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The early days of Linux (2023)

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Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#71

Post by hnlmorg »

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.

The kernel is only a small part of the overall Linux ecosystem.

These days even GNU is a small part.

systemd, Wayland, Xorg, PulseAudio, CUPS, KDE, Gnome, etc are all maintained outside of Linus and GNUs governance.

What FOSS operating systems (and not even Linux specifically) offers is freedom to choose. But the effort of using some alternatives can be significant.

So I wouldn’t say Linux is immune to having its “well poisoned” because if Linus.

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#72

Post by jmclnx »

xtracto wrote: post #37
qwertox wrote: post #36

It's odd how Linux has become the only stable thing in this world. You turn it on and you know that over time it will only become better without any bad intentions.

This is so important to me on this day and age. Most new technology and OS seem to have an agenda. They want to "push" me to do things: buy an iPhone, buy an office subscription , etc. Using Linux is a breath of fresh air in that respect for me. I just want my toaster tu toast bread. I don't want it to tell me what bread should I buy.

>I just want my toaster

I think I heard the NetBSD toaster is out of support :(

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#73

Post by t43562 »

abenga wrote: post #62
userbinator wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporate interests have already seeped into Linux.

Corporate interests are not bad per se , you would have to point to something nefarious that it has led to. Most people seem to think corporate interest in Linux has made it better by raising the level of investment to the extent that we can use it on most commodity hardware.

On the minus side of the equation, large controversial changes, more often outside the kernel but still important nevertheless, do get pushed through by people who are employed at important companies.

If your fulltime job is Linux it does give you an ability to influence what happens that others who are earning their daily bread some other way lack. You can use that ability to ride over some objections.

For some people the goal of Linux is to become the world's OS. I used to think this but I realise now that if it did, then it would become static and conformist. This is because the experience of using it would have to be stable and common so that all the users who don't care about Linux per se wouldn't have to keep relearning how to use it or at least would only need to relearn 1 way. So there would have to be the world linux distro, probably run by some bullying company that would keep app developers, hardware vendors in line.

We'd be complaining about it like we might about MS or Apple. I like Linux for the wrong reason - I like it because there's so much choice. Simplicity is about eliminating choice.

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#74

Post by II2II »

userbinator wrote: post #50
qwertox wrote: post #36

It's odd how Linux has become the only stable thing in this world. You turn it on and you know that over time it will only become better without any bad intentions.

Corporate interests have already seeped into Linux.

Thankfully most of the corporate interests that have already seeped into Linux have been a net positive. If corporations remember the lessons of the 1990's, it will remain that way.

(In the 1990's businesses either had to develop and maintain their own operating system, or license it from someone else. Both routes are expensive. There were also collaborative efforts for larger operating systems, none of which seemed to reach positive conclusions since the businesses who owned the rights to the operating systems were ultimately in direct competition with each other. For whatever reason, the open source collaborative model used by Linux has been successful. In all probability it is because nobody "owns" Linux in the conventional sense.)

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#75

Post by alt227 »

xtracto wrote: post #37
qwertox wrote: post #36

It's odd how Linux has become the only stable thing in this world. You turn it on and you know that over time it will only become better without any bad intentions.

This is so important to me on this day and age. Most new technology and OS seem to have an agenda. They want to "push" me to do things: buy an iPhone, buy an office subscription , etc. Using Linux is a breath of fresh air in that respect for me. I just want my toaster tu toast bread. I don't want it to tell me what bread should I buy.

But we ALL want our toasters to ask us if we want any toast

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#76

Post by api »

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 and a -username home folder accessible via web.

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#77

Post by api »

qwertox wrote: post #36

It's odd how Linux has become the only stable thing in this world. You turn it on and you know that over time it will only become better without any bad intentions.

It’s the right mix of open source but with so many huge well resourced users that it’s in everyone’s interest to improve it. It’s like in this specific case the tragedy of the commons works backward.

We should study the social and economic dynamics and game theory of this and try to replicate it. Someone should do a whole game theory Ph.D thesis on Linux and how it manifests an un-tragedy of the commons.

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#78

Post by forbiddenlake »

stmw wrote: post #30
Philpax wrote: post #2

[2023], but that doesn't matter much. Fantastic article! Great to see what development was like at the start - I'd always heard anecdotes, like its humble beginnings and the MINIX argument, but I'd never had context for them before.

My bad, dang just pointed this out as well: Discussed at the time (of the article): The early days of Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35557848 - April 2023 (224 comments) I just came across it and didnt' realize it appeared on Hn almost 2 years before.

It's fine, dupes are allowed after an amount of time.

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#79

Post by wejick »

stevekemp wrote: post #48
qwertox wrote: post #36

It's odd how Linux has become the only stable thing in this world. You turn it on and you know that over time it will only become better without any bad intentions.

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…

Oh that softmodem that only worked on windows.

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#80

Post by nobleach »

noisy_boy wrote: post #64
kqr wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in the mid--late '00s I had to make careful purchases of things like wifi, or be stuck manually patching and compiling half-working drivers.

ndiswrapper anyone?

LinModem for me! I got my US Robotics 33.6 (with X2 software upgrade-ability) working and was so amazed. Then my dad's ISP got rid of a bunch of external serial 56k modems and I was in heaven. Those "just worked". Oddly, it was probably 6 months later that DSL started making a splash and I was trying to figure out ways to use my Alcatel USB "stingray" model with Linux. I ended up buying an external "gateway" that required me to set the MTU to 1492 instead of 1500. It screwed up my Redhat 7.2 downloads so badly. The checksum would never match so the install would always fail.

Somehow I still refer to these as "the good old days".

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