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Comments
Impressive, happy 25th Linux!
Jappie birthday.
And still free.
Hapy birthday Linux. To all developers: thank you.
Happy birthday Linux. Thanks for literally changing the world!!!
hum, only 25?
I came from the world of spectrum in 1993 to the world of Linux, getting a cd from a german magazine I transferred to floppies and load into my 386 sx 20 Mhz computer. One of the first things i did was to compile the kernel in the idea I should remove as much "junk" as possible to make it take less space as the machine had 4 mb of ram :P
Took a night of prayers so the power does not cut...
Amazingly it worked at the first try, must have been extremely lucky, but the memory footprint wasnt much lower.
Edit: It was slackware.
I think everyone who tried Linux in its early days did exactly the same. Days and days of compiling your own kernel to reduce the memory usage and used space for some kB. Fun times
This should be a free for fall offers thread to celebrate, go...
I asked @jarland he said it was a great idea.
No, it's GPL.
I don't see why. Reimplementing Unix with free-ish license? People have done that lots of times...Torvalds was not the first...or the second...or the fifth...
Linux sucks balls. It is truly the Microsoft of Unix because they simply don't care about quality:
documentation is a complete joke. They can't even agree on a format. Critical system functions (e.g., systemd) aren't even documented on the system but instead point to some wiki...
kernel and userland are fragmented (Microsoft model) so people can never agree on things, nor is whole-system engineering possible. For example, which MAC system do you use: SElinux, AppArmor, or...? The correct answer is "none" because people turn these off immediately because they can.
the Linux community has a hard time breaking things in new releases, which is actually really important because that's how progress is made. In the *BSD world, you can make a change to the kernel and then make changes to userland and release it as a whole set because it's one tree. In Linux you can't do that, so progress and change is very slow.
indeed, the Linux world has refuses to implement many, many security mitigations because they can't without breaking things. Microsoft and Apple actually hav a better kernel in terms of implementing common mitigations - and again, it's because they control the whole tree. Linux doesn't even randomize pids for pity's sake.
GNU license, instead of a free license.
Oh wait, it's not actually the GPL, it's a modified GPL.
and btw, what is Linux? It's just a kernel. So you're really running the GNU system except for one part they haven't finished yet. Of course, they didn't finish lots of other parts so you get wide variety on file system paths, startup mechanisms (until they standardized on one that everyone seems to hate), etc. Why are there multiple Linux distros? What a waste of time.
Speaking of distros, there are really only two: RedHat and Ubuntu. If those two companies decide something (e.g., systemd), you're getting it. So Linux is really "a Unix-like clone that two private corporations have agreed upon". Sign me up for that wonderfulness!
Linux is happy to take code as long as it works. Binary blob for a video card that runs in kernel space? Sure...oh, vendor doesn't want to open their spec? That's all right, as long as they give us a blob. I find it truly shameful that Linux doesn't put more pressure on vendors to do the right thing like releasing driver code.
And I'm not a big fan of Linux Torvalds. In the early 90s, he was unrelenting in stating that using BSD code was "dangerous" because of the AT&T lawsuit, which was total nonsense, and people should use Linux instead. Then in the SCO lawsuit days, he suddenly turned around and said that these kinds of lawsuits were bogus. He's a great coder, but clearly didn't mind kicking other projects when it suited him.
The lack of documentation and the GNUisms are what irritate me most about Linux. I use it every day, but I can't wait to get back to OpenBSD or a commercial Unix, where a typo on a man page can be filed as a bug and fixed. I gave up correcting Linux docs years ago because 9 times out of 10 you never get a response. Even commercial unixes are more pleasant to use.
What I find super-annoying about the Linux world is that instead of docs, the community likes google-able tutorials which quickly get out of date and often reflect the user's particular needs instead of general explanations. I can configure nearly anything on FreeBSD or OpenBSD just by reading the man pages and published docs, and this documentation is kept up to date. There are huge parts of Linux where that isn't done and I'd challenge anyone to be set down on a remote island and try to configure Linux without referring to third-party material.
All that said, I really have nothing against Linux. If you ask me, I'll tell you why it sucks, but of course so does Windows, HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, etc. Linux on a server is better than Windows...that's not high praise, but it is praise.
I also came from the A1, N1 (USENET!), X1/2/3/4/5/6, etc. world of slackware. I have fond memories of going to a campus store to buy a 20-pack of 3.5 floppies and then trudging through the snow to a computer center (dial-up at home was way too slow) to download all the slackware floppies, then take them home, and slowly feed them into my PC for hours...heck, I learned a ton about Unix just by reading the descriptions of the packages and saying "that sounds cool, I think I'll install that too".
I love LET.
@raindog308 No, I was just impressed that it's 25 and surprised to see how the years pass, I'm feeling old.
That's true, it's just an operating system kernel though thanks to it we have nowadays distributions like Debian, CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE etc and I personally prefer it much more than Microsoft.
Interestingly, Microsoft had its own Unix at one time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix
Xenix was HUGE - indeed, it may have been the most widely-distributed Sys V Unix ever. AT&T eventually decided to get into computers (a disaster they later bailed from) and Microsoft decided it didn't want to compete against the company that invented Unix (Bell labs) and so it withdrew Xenix from the market.
The original plan was to develop Xenix to the point where its single-user version would replace MS-DOS...that's right, your PC would actually be running a single-user mode of Unix called XEDOS and then if you wanted more capabilities, you'd pay to upgrade to Xenix.
Alas, once Microsoft killed Xenix, MS-DOS continued on its own strange path.
There is only one thing that I appreciate which is the introduction and the possibility to use the linux bash shell in Windows 10.
A full, Ubuntu-based Bash shell that can run Linux software directly on Windows, finally.
It's a huge step forward but honestly it's still not the OS for developers, that's why I still prefer Linux. Will the things change? I don't know.
Wow, 25 years...Linux might have its issues, but it is a game changer.
@raindog308 I dont understand you...
OK, you have some issues with Linux, we got that, however, Linux is here and will be here for a very long time.
Is it chaotic and shoddily built, perhaps, however, the simple existence of Linux pushed the other vendors you praise to get their act together and produce something better. Would they have done it in the absence of Linux? Perhaps, but highly unlikely at the same level.
Will "crowdsourced products" ever be better than the ones produced by companies earning hundreds of billions a year? Unlikely, but they are there, so there is a void they fill, a need for that thing. Some companies will jump in and produce something for that niche, but, as long as we have many choices, we are better off.