Stefan Mileschin

Although there is very little value in the number, Linux’s mother superior Linus “Sweary” Torvalds has pointed out that his latest version of the software has the same number as Windows’ breakaway success.

Microsoft’s Windows 3.11 was the runaway success which gave Vole total control of the desktop.

When Torvalds has released Linux 3.11-rc5 he said he wished he were able to release final Linux 3.11 as on the exact same day 20 years ago Microsoft released Windows 3.11.

Sadly, the numerology did not work out and while releasing the final 3.11 today would be a lovely coincidence "it is not to be”, notes Torvalds in the release announcement.

Linux 3.11-rc5 is not that exciting. Things have been calming down in the open source world after the last release which was huge.

Torvalds noted that there is nothing huge that would stand out in the release except Radeon changes in the power management arena.

Linux 3.11 will be loaded with quite a lot of features when the final version is out. There will be LZ4 compression, Zswap, XFS file system improvements, Radeon dynamic power management support, new DRM display driver, Intel Haswell improvements, AVX2 Crypto optimizations, ARM improvements and 64-bit support for XEN and KVM virtualisation. But nothing which is as earth shattering as Windows 3.11 was in its day. Clearly there is not much to numerology.

http://news.techeye.net/software/linus-releases-3-11