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Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux

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Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux

#51

Post by bityard »

xbpx wrote: post #28

Linux somehow managed to be both the dark horse and the pride pony. Preferred tool of hacker and mega corp alike. It helped launch my career in tech when I messed up a dual boot with Windows XP and fixed it by partitioning MS out of existence. Haven't looked back since. Happy Birthday Linux!!

I can trace the start of my (reasonably prosperous) career in IT, to one off-hand comment at a Linux User Group meeting some 20 years ago. I was a student and mentioned to someone that I was looking for part-time work. Another fellow overheard and I was hired over the phone the next day.

Fair to say much of the way my life turned out is thanks to Linux and open source software.

Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux

#52

Post by 0des »

jabo wrote: post #34

Fun fact: As Linux turns 30, it also recently reached 1 Million git commits. I took these 1M commits, indexed them in Typesense, and built a search experience around it a couple of months ago: https://linux-commits-search.typesense.org/ Has some interesting nuggets in there.

Wow, this is really cool! Thank you

Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux

#53

Post by themodelplumber »

bityard wrote: post #50
themodelplumber wrote: post #47

The early days were tough on some of us PC power users who were itching to try Linux. I won a copy of Red Hat at a Unix User Group meeting, felt positively drunk with power all the way home...and never got it to start X. A few friends tried getting it to work, no go. Then I bought Mandrake at CompUSA. Same result. I tried installing again, and it was infuriating watching all those icon files getting copied over, with…

> Then I bought Mandrake at CompUSA. Ha! Me too! I thought I was the only one. I remember that whatever release it was had a bunch of problems because it was the first version not based entirely on Red Hat and that they rushed the release of the next version to fix all the issues. So my purchased boxed copy ended up being both buggy and only relevant for like 6 months. I think I switched to FreeBSD for a while after…

:-) It's funny to hear after all those years that it was a buggy release anyway...

Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux

#55

Post by smashed »

themodelplumber wrote: post #43
drewg123 wrote: post #32

I remember installing it in 92 or 93 when I was in grad school via a big pile of floppies. It was liberating to turn an otherwise useless PC into something more or less equivalent to a sparcstation. I was a huge linux fan and evangelized for it everywhere. A few years later, I was acting as a sysadmin, and wanted to replace some aging DECstations with PCs running Linux. The prototype machine was great, except for how…

Funny to see FreeBSD promoted, and Linux taken down a notch in the top comment on a thread for an article celebrating 30 years of Linux...well, funny, if a bit unexpected...

Same old same old?

It's a big part of the history. Linux has been compared to its competitors all along after all.

I remember FreeBSD being ever present all along. Ultimately, Linux won on many fronts, the biggest one maybe the vast hardware/driver support.

I've used both extensively in the 90's and early 2000's, both on the server and workstation side. Ultimately settling 100% on Linux around 2004-5.

Still, competition on this space is very healthy. Who wants an OS monoculture?

Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux

#56

Post by kjellsbells »

Redhat 4 or 5 I think from the cover CD of a magazine. Kernel 1.2.13, although the first thing you did in those days was to make config and recompile as modules were not a thing then. Makes me wonder how we found time to do anything productive really, between finding good enough hardware that Linux wouldn't balk and reading HOWTOs and fiddling with config files.

Took a diversion into OpenBSD for a few years (if you thought liveCDs were cool back then, running clustered firewalls in RAM from an immutable floppy disk blew my employer's mind) but Linux dragged me back once Sun imploded and haven't looked back.

Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux

#57

Post by [deleted] »

bityard wrote: post #48
drewg123 wrote: post #32

I remember installing it in 92 or 93 when I was in grad school via a big pile of floppies. It was liberating to turn an otherwise useless PC into something more or less equivalent to a sparcstation. I was a huge linux fan and evangelized for it everywhere. A few years later, I was acting as a sysadmin, and wanted to replace some aging DECstations with PCs running Linux. The prototype machine was great, except for how…

> I met Linus at the '94 Boston USENIX and asked about NFS file caching. He told me he didn't care about NFS, and didn't think it would ever get fixed. The interaction was unpleasant and left a very bad taste in my mouth. Linus has always been blunt about which things he cares about and which things he doesn't and I can certainly see him not caring about NFS. I'm sure he would say it really has no business being in t…

[deleted]

Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux

#58

Post by canistel »

I still remember that day when a South African colleague, who was a known Linux fan-boy, was enthusing about Linux (and also belittling Windows in the process as is customary) attempting to get us to try the OS. He even used to use Emacs for Java programming.

I had asked him then: "What about software such as Adobe Photoshop? How do I use that in Linux?"

He had said "We have GIMP! And it is free too..."

I had thought, "GIMP? What sort of name is that?". I had imagined GIMP to be a shoddily put-together Photoshop clone with a clunky interface. An amateurish, buggy imposter.

And here I am now, roughly 19 years later, typing this in Xubuntu. I plan almost every aspect of my life through Emacs Org-Mode.

And I haven't gone near a pirated copy of Photoshop for years.

Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux

#59

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

bityard wrote: post #48
drewg123 wrote: post #32

I remember installing it in 92 or 93 when I was in grad school via a big pile of floppies. It was liberating to turn an otherwise useless PC into something more or less equivalent to a sparcstation. I was a huge linux fan and evangelized for it everywhere. A few years later, I was acting as a sysadmin, and wanted to replace some aging DECstations with PCs running Linux. The prototype machine was great, except for how…

> I met Linus at the '94 Boston USENIX and asked about NFS file caching. He told me he didn't care about NFS, and didn't think it would ever get fixed. The interaction was unpleasant and left a very bad taste in my mouth. Linus has always been blunt about which things he cares about and which things he doesn't and I can certainly see him not caring about NFS. I'm sure he would say it really has no business being in t…

> I'm sure he would say it really has no business being in the kernel in the first place,

... Actually, why is it in-kernel? Just performance reasons?

> things like docker, wireguard, and hardware support always hit Linux first

FWIW, they do eventually get there; we should see docker on runj some time in the medium future, wireguard works fine in userspace and will be in the kernel soon, and hardware support is hit-or-miss but it's okay in my experience (although obviously that's very variable by person/machine).

Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux

#60

Post by blt »

oktwtf wrote: post #17
bdz wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in high school and that was the first time I've ever seen a live CD. A full functioning OS running on a CD? School PCs were running XP and most things were locked down. But lo and behold the magic live CD made you do a lot of things otherwise were not allowed. Good times. I always had a live CD with me for years (and it was actually really useful)

I recall getting a shipment of about 50 CDs simply by asking for some online. I handed them out to just about anyone, mostly peers at school, however I remember having some left over and tossing some out during Halloween amongst some candy to some young kids too. I like to think at least a few of them got used and hopefully introduced a couple to a lifelong addiction to Linux. Those dark, dark hours/days/weeks with X…

> If the forums weren't there, read the docs, if the docs weren't helpful you could read the source.

This experience made me a true believer. Never needed to do it with kernel source code, but with libraries and userspace apps.

Hitting the closed-source wall in SDKs and environments like Matlab is frustrating and takes all the fun out of programming.

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