Linus took the stage at the latest LinuxCon 2015

Oct 8, 2015 08:39 GMT  ·  By

Linus Torvalds took the stage at the latest LinuxCon 2015 that took place in Dublin, Ireland, and talked about a number of things, including security and the future for Linux on ARM hardware.

The Linux kernel development community is going through some turmoil these days and a couple of prominent developers have left the project, citing the toxic community and various other problems. One of them even pointing the finger at Linus and their timing was chosen so that the news about their departure would overlap with LinuxCon 2015. From the looks of it, Linus wasn't asked about these issues, but he did talk about other things.

Linus Torvalds rarely gives presentations, and he's usually interviewed or is doing a Q&A with the people in the audience. At LinuxCon 2015 he answered some questions from Dirk Hohndel, who is actually the Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist at Intel. There is nothing that will blow your mind, but there are a couple of interesting statements nonetheless.

Linus says 2016 will be the year of the ARM laptop

There is no doubt that Chromebooks are taking over the world, slowly, but we have to keep in mind that a large number of those Chromebooks are running with ARM processors. Many of the people who buy Chromebooks don't really care what processor it has, as long as it works, and so the ARM CPUs are spreading.

"I’m happy to see that ARM is making progress. One of these days, I will actually have a machine with ARM. They said it would be this year, but maybe it’ll be next year. 2016 will be the year of the ARM laptop," said Linus, according to Linux.com.

Linus also explained that one of the problems they are now facing is actually about finding people to maintain the available Linux kernel. It's not a glorious job, and it usually entails answering emails seven days a week. Finding someone with the proper set of skills and the time to do this job is difficult.

You can read more about what Linus said on Linux.com.