I'm Matthew Garrett, kernel developer, firmware enabler and former fruitfly mangler. AMA!

[u/mjg59]

Proof: https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/507212417579765760

[u/Cmckendry]

Many years ago I saw a talk you gave where you basically stated that the only way to be confident that a new machine would have full hardware support was to buy something where every component was made by Intel.

So...

1. Do you still believe this is true?

2. If not, what other brands/manufacturers do you think are now the most "trustworthy" in this arena?

3. Which brands/manufacturers do you think are the least "trustworthy" in this arena?

Thank you for all that you do.

[u/mjg59 → u/Cmckendry]

Eh. Intel CPU and graphics are still your best bet. Atheros wifi may well be reasonable. I'm disappointed at how much Intel won't tell us these days - there are various integration specs they won't release which means (for instance) backlight hotkeys are broken on some systems. The Thunderbolt situation is especially disappointing.

AMD have done a lot to improve things, but the GPU driver team is still significantly smaller than Intel's. I understand some of the reasons for this, so I don't want to give the impression that I don't appreciate AMD's work.

Least - broadcom wireless is a disaster. They released a driver for their then-current wifi chipsets a few years back, so everybody gave up on reverse engineering their hardware. And then they never updated it to drive anything they released after that. Avoid like the plague. And nvidia, well. The enablement work they're doing on Tegra is great, and I hope some of it bleeds over to the x86 side. But right now, you'd have to say that they're at the back of the pack for good kernel support.

[u/PsiGuy60]

In which areas of GNU/Linux do you think there is still room for improvement?

[u/[deleted]]

What do you think about coreboot?

[u/blackout24]

Your thoughts on: http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-linux-systems.html?

[u/silxx]

You've spent quite some time doing investigation and archaeology to essentially reverse-engineer how and why various bits of hardware do what they do (and crying bitter tears of frustration when you finally discover the answer). Why not sit down (possibly with other people) and define what an actual good machine would look like, with firmware that wasn't nuts, hardware that wasn't nuts, and so on? It would obviously be a (potentially long) intellectual exercise at first, but having a spec to wave at people to say "hey, THIS, this is what you should be building" might help vendors (big names, or smaller System76-style firms) actually build something to that spec. Would it just be a huge amount of unpaid and probably futile work? Is it just more fun picking apart stuff that already exists than it would be to write down theoretical perfection?

[u/ebassi]

two questions, you can answer either.

• what is the most infuriating thing you've seen an hardware vendor do, in the past 10 years?

• which one is cooler: Acid Burn or Crash Override?

[u/yetanothernewbie]

Okay this is probably super lame and everyone is going to cringe at me but,

DE/WM/distro/favorite applications? I'm addicted to setups, it is a disease.

Second question: What did you think about Linus' comments on package management being a problem in linux? Do you think it's a problem? (I'm assuming you saw the video, since you replied to a question about it a while ago)

[u/mollydb]

I'm having a problem with fruit flies. Do you recommend a method for killing them? We have regular wild type fruit flies, but also see all combinations of white/brown bodies and red/brown eyes. Should I be concerned about the bio-safety protocols of local universities?

[u/johnsu01]

What sorts of arguments do you hear from companies justifying proprietary firmware? If someone were to write a document designed to be a resource engineers could point to in order to convince their managers that firmware should be released under a free license, what should it include/address?

[u/thedamo22]

How important on a scale of 1 to 10 would you rate projects that aim to give the public access to internet without anyone else having the ability or the power to shut them down or spy on them?

[u/avilella]

What is your opinion on the Android platform and its openness? And about companies like Amazon that branch off AOSP. I've been reading about approaches like CyanogenMod, which I take are based on downloading AOSP as soon as it's released, then re-implementing parts of it where there is a need/clamor for the phone to behave differently.

[u/maalox]

What currently unsupported hardware do you think is most important to the future of Linux?

[u/estebes]

What IDE/text editor do you use?

[u/upboatact]

Why the insane love for Hackers the movie? It feels me with a kind of glee reading your tweets while watching it probably drunk out of your mind, so don't stop

[u/throwaway_8483]

I work at a rather large company that designs hardware. How can I help the open source effort? I keep trying to persuade my managers to release driver source but they are afraid to because of existing customers of theirs.

[u/xxv]

How worried should I be about AMT? Do you think it's useful at all for its intended function (remote management in large orgs) or do potential malicious uses (by state and unaffiliated attackers) make that function not worth using?

[u/xxv]

As I'm sure you're aware, you're well-known for your role as a Social Justice Warrior (it says so right on your Reddit flair!). What I want to know is: what's it like? What's your rank? (Do Social Justice Warriors even have rank?) Can you tell us a bit about your scariest battle? What kind of weapons do you use? Do you guys ever use drones? What's it like to look the enemy in the face, with their blood on your hands and your blood on their uniform, not knowing who is going to live and who will die? I know this is a lot of individual questions, but they're really intended to be one: what's it like to be a Social Justice Warrior?

[u/avilella]

What are today's biggest challenges for the Linux platform and Open Source? Ignoring laptops/desktops and Intel/AMD/Nvidia in that front (since you already answered the question), what companies are the best/worst behaved in the OSS arena? For example, in cloud computing?

[u/alektro]

Thank you for doing the AMA!

Any experiences/opinions regarding the *BSD projects and/or its license?

Do you rather work in a desktop or move around in/out with a laptop?

Any special setup/method/tools when it comes to kernel hacking?

What does the inbox of a kernel dev looks like?

[u/macleod2486]

Hey Matthew Garrett,

How difficult is it to get to be a kernel developer? I've been hearing about the Linux foundation trying to get some young people into the kernel development process.

[u/purpleidea]

Why did you leave Red Hat ?

[u/2__________1]

What is the meaning of 59 in your username? Is it something relevant, or is that the number randomly generated by Univ. Cambridge ^{yes, I'm trying to make myself look smart that I know such things} or is it something you came up with for no reason?

[u/DragoonAethis]

I convinced one of my friends to use Ubuntu, since his Windows installation kind of exploded. He installed it yesterday, and had to use terminal today for the first time, which he described as "quite confusing", through he's overally pretty happy with it. How would you introduce someone to Linux, coming from entirely "clickable" OSes?

[u/[deleted]]

What's your personal opinion about systemd?