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Open Source Linux

How Open Source Advocates Celebrated The 26th Anniversary of Linux (linux.com) 99

Posted by EditorDavid from the 26-years-young dept.
To celebrate Linux's 26th anniversary, the Linux Foundation tweeted a picture of Tux on a birthday cake, and linked to an essay on OpenSource.com by FreeDOS founder Jim Hall: My first Linux distribution was Softlanding Linux System (SLS) 1.03, with Linux kernel 0.99 alpha patch level 11. That required a whopping 2MB of RAM, or 4MB if you wanted to compile programs, and 8MB to run X windows... To celebrate, I reinstalled SLS 1.05 to remind myself what the Linux 1.0 kernel was like and to recognize how far Linux has come since the 1990s.
"Getting X windows to perform was not exactly easy..." Hall writes, adding "the concept of a desktop didn't exist yet." Meanwhile Phoronix celebrated by republishing that fateful email Linus Torvalds sent on August 25, 1991. And Fossbytes shared the most recent statistics about modern-day Linux's 20 million lines of code from the Linux Foundation: During the period between the 3.19 and 4.7 releases, the kernel community was merging changes at an average rate of 7.8 patches per hour; that is a slight increase from the 7.71 patches per hour seen in the previous version of this report, and a continuation of the longterm trend toward higher patch volumes.
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How Open Source Advocates Celebrated The 26th Anniversary of Linux More

How Open Source Advocates Celebrated The 26th Anniversary of Linux

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  • I'm sad to say it, but Linux is dead to me. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 26, 2017 @10:49AM (#55089577)

    I had been using Linux from very early on. Although I had primarily worked with SunOS/Solaris and HP-UX systems, a fellow programmer introduced me to Yggdrasil Linux. I started using it full time, and eventually moved to Debian, which I used for nearly 20 years.

    But today, Linux is pretty much dead to me. Systemd and GNOME 3, among other changes, have effectively ruined it for me. Nothing ruins a Linux user's experience more than having their system not boot fully due to some obscure, and usually stupid, problem involving systemd. The GNOME 3 desktop is, in my opinion, totally unusable. The other desktop environments aren't much better.

    When I use Linux today, it feels more like I'm using Windows than it does I'm using a *nix-like system.

    I know that I can use an archaic distro like Slackware, or an inconvenient one like Gentoo, or a hobbyist distro like Devuan. But none of those really meet my needs. All I really want is the Debian we had just a few years ago, right before the switch to systemd and GNOME 3: stable, reliable, trustworthy and fun to use.

    After systemd prevented my Debian system from booting much too often, I switched to FreeBSD. It gives me everything Linux used to give me, but now it gives me so much more. Its excellent ZFS support is a game-changer. Its reliability is truly amazing. It performs very well. Most importantly, I trust its developers to do the right thing, and preserve the In hindsight, I wish I had switched to FreeBSD much earlier.

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I'm on Windows 10 right now (actually, as I type this) and I don't have any of the problems you're having. It boots flawlessly every time, updates itself regularly with security patches, and the user interface is industry standard and eminently usable. It never crashes, and if a rogue program does it is isolated and easily dispatched. I can sit down at any workstation either at my place of employment or a friend's house and get right to work - no acclimatization needed. And I know that any software I wa

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by murdocj ( 543661 )

        I'm on Windows 10 right now (actually, as I type this) and I don't have any of the problems you're having. It boots flawlessly every time, updates itself regularly with security patches, and the user interface is industry standard and eminently usable. It never crashes, and if a rogue program does it is isolated and easily dispatched. I can sit down at any workstation either at my place of employment or a friend's house and get right to work - no acclimatization needed. And I know that any software I want or need will run natively on my OS - no tricks, hoops, or work-arounds. I couldn't be more pleased.

    • Some anonymous [slashdot.org] troll said: .. "I had been using Linux from very early on .. But today, Linux is pretty much dead to me .. The GNOME 3 desktop is, in my opinion, totally unusable. The other desktop environments aren't much better." ..

      You're talking total rubbish if you don't mind me saying so:

      Raspberry PI Desktop [raspberrypi.org]

      Linux Mint 18.1 "Cinnamon" overview [youtube.com]

      KDE Plasma 5.X Review 2015 [youtube.com]

      Ubuntu Gnome 17.04 Review [youtube.com]

    • "But today, Linux is pretty much dead to me. Systemd and GNOME 3, among other changes, have effectively ruined it for me. Nothing ruins a Linux user's experience more than having their system not boot fully due to some obscure, and usually stupid, problem involving systemd."

      It is interesting that almost all the complaints about systemd seem to be from Debian users.

      I use a number of systemd-based distros, from desktops to productiom servers, and have never seen problems like this.

      Maybe you shouldn't be blami

    • Frankly, if you're a "very early" Linux user, you should damn well know that there are other desktop environments around, and non-desktop environments too (just pick a window manager and that's it!)

      That said, there is some brain damage coming from the freedesktop crew that is really hard to avoid. Did you know that PolicyKit -- something that is pretty much needed to run X -- nowadays needs mozilla's javascript interpreter to run?

      Why, you ask? Well, they decided to make it user-configurable, give it hooks.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by zdruid ( 1122999 )
      There is so much ignorance in this comment. This guy seems to equate linux with a desktop environment. In the server side linux is the dominating operating system, and in the desktop side there are so many options to GNOME. I dislike GNOME too, I use LXDE or Xfce for that reason, but from that simple issue to say linux is dead there is a big distance. This comment is a complete nonsense.

  • How they celebrated? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    All the guys met in one of the guys parent's basement. It was BYOC, (Bring Your Own Cheetoes), BYOM (Bring Your Own Manga), and drink of choice.

    They sat around saying how Windows sucks and how Apple couldn't exist without them.

    They then compared neck beards and shared secrets on expandable waistband pants.

    And then one asked, "Hey! Why do people think Big Bang Theory is funny? What's up with that?"

    Mumbles and grumbling around room in agreement.

    Then, they all say down and watched the new Star Wars and then th

    • My laugh for the day was an image macro that had all the ingredients for a cake. It said, "Happy birthday! I got you a cake, but you have to compile it yourself."

  • Ahhh... Linux and Open Source (Score:5, Informative)

    by wjcofkc ( 964165 ) on Saturday August 26, 2017 @11:00AM (#55089637)
    I've been at this long enough to remember when Linux and Open Source as a dev model where all but laughed at by industry as not and will never amount to anything. Fast forward to know and Linux runs on everything and the Open Source dev model rules the day. But does it run Linux? But what doesn't! I am satisfied that we have achieved "The day of Linux on the desk\laptop." Going back a few decades, I don't think most people suspected we would be surrounded by all manner of things running Linux.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      Linux is a great success, but it's also a fairly lonely success for the FSF. Pretty much none of the consumer devices running Linux can be altered in any practical way because they have locked boot loaders and only take signed updates. And the user space is pretty much all Apache 2.0, not GPL which doesn't really grant you any rights to the source code shipping with your device. Open source has made it pretty big, but I'd say Linux is an oddity.

      With Google's "Treble" interface they're moving towards a stabl

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by wjcofkc ( 964165 )
        Yes but Google is also a bastard company. I often wonder what their "Do no evil" motto is relative to. They have been falling out of favor with me for several years now. I am quite perturbed by their many monopolies on information. As a company, they are certainly the anti-FSF. Then again, the FSF so mired in impractical philosophy, their lack of relevance and influence is their own fault. All the same, they may yet see their day. Time will tell. People see ourselves as entrenched in wild computer\communica

        • I'd also add that calling Android "Linux" is like saying you have a Ferrari because you taped fake paddle shifters to the steering wheel of your 1983 Toyota Carolla.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Kjella ( 173770 )

            I'd also add that calling Android "Linux" is like saying you have a Ferrari because you taped fake paddle shifters to the steering wheel of your 1983 Toyota Carolla.

            I'm pretty sure Linux is still the name of Linus' project first and the collection of technologies that happen to like running on top of that kernel second. And they very much like to count Android and busybox when making statistics or the Linux is everywhere posts. People only get religious about GNU/Linux when it's time to make no true Scotsman posts.

  • "...the concept of a desktop didn't exist yet."

    Um, there are some Commodore Amigas and Apple MacIntoshes outside that would like to have a few words with you...."

    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      by Knuckles ( 8964 )

      I didn't know Macs and Amigas used X Windows, on Slashdot I learn something new every day

    • The full quote is this:

      But this is X windows from 1994, and the concept of a desktop didn't exist yet. My options were either FVWM (a virtual window manager) or TWM (the tabbed window manager). TWM was straightforward to set up and provided a simple, yet functional, graphical environment.

      I'm not sure how those modes differ from a "desktop", but it's clear he's specifically talking about X Windows' implementation. The quote in the summary is taken horribly out of context.

      • Re:OK.... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Entrope ( 68843 ) on Saturday August 26, 2017 @11:52AM (#55089857) Homepage

        Window managers (at least in those days) generally did not provide widget trays, launch menus, or other things you usually see on an empty modern-day computer desktop. They decorated each window with controls -- one or more resizing buttons, a frame on at least one side of the window, and usually a system menu -- and arranged icons for minimized applications. fvwm was notable for providing virtual workspaces.

        On the other hand, the Common Desktop Environment (CDE, whence KDE got its name) was first released in 1993, so there was not just the concept of a desktop environment for X back then, but even a shipping implementation. CDE was not very nice to use -- where I was introduced to Linux in the mid-'90s, fvwm2 was much more popular -- but it is clearly recognizable as a predecessor to modern computer desktops.

    • Not to mention SGI and Solaris systems that had rather advanced xwindows base UI. Even window 3.1 was out.

      I found that statement to be ignoring the fact that Linux has been lagging in the desktop UI. Until the mid 2000's where device plug and play started to work. And simple things today like all the apps available in the GUI window menu were actually installed on the system. Wasn't always the case.

  • Back in 1997... (Score:3)

    by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Saturday August 26, 2017 @11:11AM (#55089687)
    The first version of Linux I ever played around with was from a book with CDs about Slackware in 1997. Must have been an old version as it never worked with my Socket 7 motherboard with an AMD K5 processor. Back then it was compile and pray to get anything working. I later ran SuSE 5 through 10. Switched to Ubuntu for a while. Fedora and Mint are my favorite distros for work. These days I use Red Hat at home in case I ever get a job that required Red Hat experience.
  • Someone made a cake [twitter.com], but some compiling needed.

  • I was installing Slackware with kernel 0.97pl3 while waiting for VisualC++ 1.0 to build. Could never get X to run on my video7 card, though...

  • Manchester Computer Center (MCC) Interim Linux zero-dot-something. A boot floppy and IIRC four more floppies for a system capable of compiling the kernel. I didn't have enough memory for X, but found and installed the MGR simple windowing system.

  • I was enjoying 2016, the year of the Linux desktop, on my Linux desktop and saw the news and thought, "Wow, after having the first black president, we're going to have the first woman president. Things are only going to go up from here!" I was so innocent back then.

  • Midlife crisis, anyone?

  • "Linux users celebrated the 26th anniversary by struggling to install nVidia drivers."

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