Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The early days of Linux (2023)

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 143 posts

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#121

Post by cbm-vic-20 »

jasoneckert wrote: post #106
ttyprintk wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is consistent with big universities at the time. I remember when Alpha was becoming discontinued, reinstalling RedHat on those did give Linux a boost as a daily driver for researchers.

Linux definitely breathed life into that great platform. I still have an Alpha Personal Workstation 600au in my basement running Red Hat from that time period.

I had a Jensen (DECpc AXP 150) and an Alpha Multia; there were the first targets for Windows NT 3.51 on Alpha, but I had early Alpha Linux running on them. These might still be buried in the basement of my parents' house. Not as cool as the OSF/1-based DECserver 2100 "Sable" at work. I loved that machine.

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#122

Post by chem83 »

From the linked Wikipedia article on Tannenbaum x Torvalds debate: > but 5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5

I find it interesting how academic circles back then were really not betting on the longevity of x86.

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#123

Post by pjmlp »

chem83 wrote: post #122

From the linked Wikipedia article on Tannenbaum x Torvalds debate: > but 5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5 I find it interesting how academic circles back then were really not betting on the longevity of x86.

It was not believed UNIX workstations were to be disrupted as they were with Google plans of cheap PC hardware running GNU/Linux on x86.

Maybe had BSD not be fighting AT&T, or Microsoft bothered with providing a proper POSIX experience in Windows NT insteaf of making the minimum for goverment contracts, and Linux history would have been much different, including its impact on cheap UNIX servers.

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#124

Post by jabl »

api wrote: post #76
linuxhansl wrote: post #40

Fun. I started using Linux at 0.98 (forgot the patch level), in 1992. Had a modem and connected to a lot of bulletin boards. I felt very much a like "WarGames" hero, calling phone numbers and all :) I still remember the day when I used ppp to connect to the actual Internet for the first time. After a lot of trial and error, I finally pinged www.linux.org, and it resolved the hostname and returned the ping. I was sile…

My first net connection was using slirp via a shell account. Slirp was a CSLIP emulator that ran in user space on the shell box on the remote side. Back in those days multi user shell machines were quite common and some of the first ISPs offered Internet access that way. Mine was an ISP called Internet Access Cincinnati that gave each user shell on a Sun Sparc 10 running SunOS (pre-Solaris). You also got POP e-mail a…

Ha, Running slirp in the ISP shell box was also how I first got beyond bbs'ed onto the wild west of the internet.

Also getting online was one of my first motivations for using Linux, as the Trumpet winsock networking library for Windows 3.1 was terrible and crashed the entire computer all the time.

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#125

Post by pjmlp »

vednig wrote: post #41
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every well can be poisoned. Linux relies on people's values and people's skills. Neither of which are immune to degradation over time. Much like the post world war civil society, economic and diplomatic development was an exception in Human history. Assuming the reality we have will remain forever without protection or constant maintenance effort is dangerous.

> Every well can be poisoned. Linux relies on people's values and people's skills. Neither of which are immune to degradation over time. It's rather the opposite, combined with moral stance of Linus and it's core committee itself that has managed to kept Linux on this track so far.

All of us aren't going to stay forever on the planet, and whoever replaces Linus and the core committee has their own set of values, and goals for the project, there are zero garantees that everything stays the same no matter what.

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#126

Post by pimeys »

Philpax wrote: post #108
stevekemp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do remember there was some point in the mid/late 90s where I had to do a lot of research before buying [desktop] computers and hardware - would this specific network card be supported? Would this graphics card work with X11? etc. Maybe it was trauma and paranoia from the WinModems of the day, that were never going to work. But by the early 2000s we seemed to switch to a world where I just assumed Linux would suppor…

Just as long as you don't buy NVIDIA for your Linux desktop!

The author of nouveau is working for NVIDIA now. And redhat is writing their nova driver to the mainstream. I really wish this would mean using NVIDIA is going to be a breeze in the near future.

Until that I'll buy AMD.

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#127

Post by 999900000999 »

linguae wrote: post #119
9front wrote: post #111

We will always have Linux, the kernel, but the desktop experience is being sabotaged by Microsoft with WSL.

I disagree with the notion that Microsoft is sabotaging the Linux desktop via WSL. In my opinion, I believe it’s the Sisyphean development churn of the FOSS desktop ecosystem that held the Linux desktop back. However, the industry-wide move away from native apps toward Web apps, combined with growing dissatisfaction with Windows in some circles and with the high cost of switching to a Mac (especially for those who ne…

Don't forget Valve.

Without Steam's built in Proton compatibility layer no gamer would realistically use Linux.

Outside of work I'm probably 70% Linux and 30% Windows. Music production is much better on Windows, but software development is miles easier on Linux. Messing around with Ubuntu during my teenage years was a key part of my later career!

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#128

Post by bigstrat2003 »

Philpax wrote: post #108
stevekemp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do remember there was some point in the mid/late 90s where I had to do a lot of research before buying [desktop] computers and hardware - would this specific network card be supported? Would this graphics card work with X11? etc. Maybe it was trauma and paranoia from the WinModems of the day, that were never going to work. But by the early 2000s we seemed to switch to a world where I just assumed Linux would suppor…

Just as long as you don't buy NVIDIA for your Linux desktop!

I've had multiple Nvidia cards across multiple installs of Linux, never had an issue once. Just install the Nvidia driver and it works. IMO the supposed problems of using Nvidia on Linux are wildly overblown.

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#129

Post by bigstrat2003 »

flohofwoe wrote: post #103
neontomo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alan Turing took his own life on purpose or by accident, he wasn't murdered

If you read up on how the UK government treated him after the war, it was essentially murder even if they didn't outright execute him.

No, words mean things. If they didn't actually pull the trigger, it wasn't murder. That isn't to say it was ok to treat Turing the way they did, because it wasn't ok. But it's important to not pollute the meaning of words by misusing them for greater rhetorical impact.

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#130

Post by samiv »

Oh, I thought it's still the early days considering that just the other day the whole system went into a death spiral where everything graphical slowly ground to a halt and then froze completely and I had to pull the power cord. Or considering that building my project in debug (yes, bog standard CMake debug build with GCC) causes a complete kernel hang about half the time and I have to pull the power cord again.

Linux (as in the kernel + whatever user space you choose) is about 90% done. Now it just needs the other 90% to be taken care of to move beyond alpha....

"The year of the Linux desktop is always 10 years from now" ;-)

Post reply on HN