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Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux

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Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux

#61

Post by noisy_boy »

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. Same result.

I bought Mandrake online I think around early 2000's (for love of god, I can't remember how/which website). Everything worked (for realistic definition of "everything" in those days when it came to Linux). It was the most polished of the few distributions I experienced (until Ubuntu Dapper Drake came along much later and basically blew me away).

Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux

#63

Post by noisy_boy »

I used to joke that once you had an X config working, basically print out few copies (provided you can get the printer working), laminate & frame them all and hang them in office, home, friend's home... Now I just fearlessly upgrade Linux / switch distros with reasonable confidence that everything will continue to work. We have come a long way.

Like countless others, Linux has really changed my life. And I'm eternally thankful to it for that.

Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux

#64

Post by throwawaylinux »

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...

I think it might be the the underdog or obscurity element, but pro-BSD (anti-Linux) comments are frequently upvoted here. More unusual I think would be to see one criticizing one of the free BSDs relative to Linux, surely?

Some prominent Linux developers and interactions in person or on mailing lists can be nasty, rude, even bullying. There are also a great deal of very nice people, and in the middle are a lot of people who can get frustrated or upset at times when discussions become robust, but are not inherently mean.

Exactly the same for the BSDs. The free BSDs have famously fragmented into several major groups, in some cases due to quite toxic conflicts including by some prominent members and leaders. BSDs are not objectively better than Linux in that regard.

Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux

#65

Post by amatecha »

bityard wrote: post #51
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.

That's awesome! I had to kinda "force" Linux on my workplace at the time but it was really rewarding to get an efficient network/server setup going for them. I also ran it as my desktop there (though had to use Wine a bit ;)). Good times :)

Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux

#67

Post by amatecha »

dleslie wrote: post #16

I used to order boxes of Ubuntu CDs, when they still shipped them for free, and would hand them out to students at University; the pitch that it had a full free office-compatible suite and a C compiler was enough to get people to readily pick up discs.

Boxes?! Nice. I still have a handful of those old Ubuntu live CDs for a couple different architectures. Pretty cool lil piece of computing history now, I guess. Not sure I really "converted" anyone to use Linux, but it got a few people interested to be sure!

Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux

#68

Post by throwawaylinux »

int_19h wrote: post #39

In retrospect, I often still wonder what would have happened if BSD weren't mired in legal issues at the time.

I doubt things would have been much different. It wasn't "mired" in legal issues, there was one lawsuit was brought against one company selling the code (not developers or users or hobbyists) in 1992, in '93 their injunction was denied and the case collapsed from there with a counter suit launched. It was all settled in 94.

The myth is that BSD development ceased or scaled right back, but that really wasn't the case. NetBSD's initial release was early 93, FreeBSD's initial release was late 93. Clearly they had been busy developing things leading up to it, and were confident enough to release entire new forks.

The lawsuit is a commonly cited reason, but I think that's more of a retroactive justification that's doesn't really come with solid evidence or reasoning.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190605151240/https:/www.softpa...

You read things like this and it's just handwaving without much actual evidence at best, and at worst grasping at straws, with the usual bitter sour-grapes lines like "One of the reasons that he was a real volunteer and has a demanding day job (as we can see later this was almost never true for Linus Torvalds)."

Linux was just 3 years old at the time the lawsuit was settled, a project from an undergrad, whereas BSDs had much longer commercial and serious academic heritage, the Berkeley Software Distribution that 386BSD came from had started 15 years earlier! Fact is Linux was starting from well behind at that point. Linux simply gathered more momentum, whether it was the technology, the people, the community, the GNU userland, I don't know but I'm pretty sure the lawsuit was a very minor part of it and what effect it did have would not have shifted overall trajectories or ultimate outcome.

Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux

#69

Post by techrat »

int_19h wrote: post #36
techrat wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coming from someone who grew up during the floppy diskette booting and installing era of computing... what Knoppix managed to do by giving us the LiveCD just still seems like pure black magic fuckery to me. Install an OS from CD? Fine. USING an OS only booting from CD? HOLY SHIT. I'm glad it became an option on the majority of distributions. IMHO it still remains the killer feature over Windows if you want to show so…

If I remember correctly, QNX 4 demo was the first graphical OS that I've seen booting and running from a floppy . That was somewhere in late 90s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_VlI6IBEJ0 https://web.archive.org/web/19991128112050/http://www.qnx.co...

As impressive as it was at the time (and still is), a floppy is writable.

Booting from read only media and having a fully functioning OS was completely groundbreaking. Especially when you consider how much hardware was supported without configuration.

Re: Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux

#70

Post by themodelplumber »

noisy_boy wrote: post #61
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. Same result. I bought Mandrake online I think around early 2000's (for love of god, I can't remember how/which website). Everything worked (for realistic definition of "everything" in those days when it came to Linux). It was the most polished of the few distributions I experienced (until Ubuntu Dapper Drake came along much later and basically blew me away).

That's awesome. I really wanted to like it. I'm glad it worked for you.
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