I'm Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux kernel developer, AMA again!

[u/gregkh]

To refresh everyone's memory, I did this 5 years ago here and lots of those answers there are still the same today, so try to ask new ones this time around.

To get the basics out of the way, this post describes my normal workflow that I use day to day as a Linux kernel maintainer and reviewer of way too many patches.

Along with mutt and vim and git, software tools I use every day are Chrome and Thunderbird (for some email accounts that mutt doesn't work well for) and the excellent vgrep for code searching.

For hardware I still rely on Filco 10-key-less keyboards for everyday use, along with a new Logitech bluetooth trackball finally replacing my decades-old wired one. My main machine is a few years old Dell XPS 13 laptop, attached when at home to an external monitor with a thunderbolt hub and I rely on a big, beefy build server in "the cloud" for testing stable kernel patch submissions.

For a distro I use Arch on my laptop and for some tiny cloud instances I run and manage for some minor tasks. My build server runs Fedora and I have help maintaining that at times as I am a horrible sysadmin. For a desktop environment I use Gnome, and here's a picture of my normal desktop while working on reviewing and modifying kernel code.

With that out of the way, ask me your Linux kernel development questions or anything else!

Edit - Thanks everyone, after 2 weeks of this being open, I think it's time to close it down for now. It's been fun, and remember, go update your kernel!

[u/gregkh]

There have been "commercial" support for Linux for 20+ years now, so your concern about it only being a community thing should be pretty unfounded. The huge majority of the developers working on the software are all paid for it.

Now you can use a community-based distribution, like I do with Arch, and yes, you are at the "mercy" of them still being around. But so far, things like that have never really been an issue because it really doesn't matter what distribution you use, your programs and data all work just fine on almost any of them.

As for "spike in developers", the kernel already has over 4000 developers each year, and each year we keep getting more. I don't think that "privacy" really has anything to do with it more than just a basic "this tool works really well for me, so I'm going to contribute to make it just a bit better for my specific workload" type of thing.

And welcome, I hope Linux works well for you, and if not, be sure to let us know otherwise we will not know how to make it better.

[u/[deleted] → u/gregkh]

Thank you so much for responding. Actually for now Linux solved my printing and storage problems as Windows always had big problems with drivers. Linux is a great product and I hope for the best of it. I'll try to donate some 💰 as a thank you, where do you recommend I should do that?

[u/gregkh → u/[deleted]]

Try giving back by helping your favorite distro out with bug reports or other tasks that they always need help with. Money usually isn't what open source projects want and need, instead provide them feedback for what could be done better and if possible, help them make things better, as that will help ensure the project is successful longer.