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Operating Systems Open Source Linux Technology

Linux Turns 27 (omgubuntu.co.uk) 170

Posted by msmash from the godspeed dept.
It's been 27 years since Linus Torvalds let a group of people know about his "hobby" OS. OMGUbuntu blog writes: Did you know that Linux, like Queen Elizabeth II, actually has two birthdays? Some FOSS fans consider the first public release of (prototype) code, which dropped on October 5, 1991, as more worthy of being the kernel's true anniversary date. Others, ourselves included, take today, August 25, as the "birth" date of the project. And for good reason. This is the day on which, back in 1991, a young Finnish college student named Linus Torvalds sat at his desk to let the folks on comp.os.minix newsgroup know about the "hobby" OS he was working on. The "hobby OS" that wouldn't, he cautioned, be anything "big" or "professional." Even as Linux continues to have lion's share in the enterprise world, it has only managed to capture a tiny fraction of the consumer space. Further reading: Ask Slashdot: Whatever Happened To the 'Year of Linux on Desktop'?

Which Linux-based distro do you use? What changes, if any, would you like to see in it in the next three years?
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Linux Turns 27

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  • A tiny fraction of the consumer market? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24, 2018 @08:07PM (#57190524)

    Linux the kernel.

    You know, the kernel in all those android phones and tablets.

    Quite frankly Linux is in most smart phones and tablets, and is the most popular phone os kernel of all time.

    Therefore itâ(TM)s incredibly popular and successful in the consumer market.

  • battery life on laptops (Score:5, Informative)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Friday August 24, 2018 @08:15PM (#57190558) Journal
    Improvement of battery life on laptops would be nice. I'm planning to work on that myself but I have three other projects I need to get through first, so it might take a few years before I get around to it. Hopefully someone else will have done it by then.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by DeBaas ( 470886 )

      Improvement of battery life on laptops would be nice.

      This.. I have been using Linux on my laptops for over a decade now. The only downside compared to the alternatives for me is battery life.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by illtud ( 115152 )

      Have you tried powertop (which has an --autotune - but not sure how reliable that is)? Useful to turn off stuff you never use that's draining battery.

  • Only a tiny fraction of the consumer market ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by quax ( 19371 ) on Friday August 24, 2018 @08:19PM (#57190570)

    ... if you forget about Android.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      but android is getting replaced soon... https://www.digitaltrends.com/... [digitaltrends.com]

      • How quickly does this description of Fuchsia OS jump between kernel and home screen! Just in the space of 2 short paragphs! It remains to be seen what definition of the 'OS' are we going to adapt soon...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cyba ( 25058 )

      ... and many TVs, home routers, in-car entertainment (ICE) systems, etc.

  • Slackware! (Score:4, Informative)

    by Sooner Boomer ( 96864 ) <sooner.boomr@noSpAM.gmail.com> on Friday August 24, 2018 @08:26PM (#57190598) Journal

    For the win!

  • Wouldn't that mean it was discontinued? If a manufacturer drops a product, that means they no longer make it. That is the opposite of what happened on 5 October 1991.

  • Distro: Debian Change: Scrap Systemd (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Friday August 24, 2018 @08:44PM (#57190668)

    No need for anything else, really, as the systemd crap is replaced with a sane alternative.

    • Re:Distro: Debian Change: Scrap Systemd (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Friday August 24, 2018 @08:51PM (#57190700)

      I still say it was a ploy by Redhat to bring in more support money. Here install this massive monstrosity that hasn't been tested and does many extraneous things a startup manager should never worry about. Trust us it will work fine. What is the reason for systemd having a caching DNS server?

      • Re:Distro: Debian Change: Scrap Systemd (Score:4, Informative)

        by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Friday August 24, 2018 @09:29PM (#57190818)

        My thoughts exactly. Make it complex, behaving arbitrarily, reduce diagnostics possibilities (binary logging) etc. and many enterprise system administrators will just have their bosses pay for support instead of wading through the mess themselves.

      • I am as mistrustful of systemd and the number of services that have come under the control of that project as anyone else, but I have not found stability to an issue. This is with long term operation of multiple Linux machines, server, desktop and laptop. For servers, I remove network manager, but that is pretty easy.

        If you are going to trash systemd, and there certainly are reasons to be critical, please stick to the facts.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Stick to the facts scrupulously and exactly, like the pro-systemd faction you mean? Also, that you have not found stability issues does not imply others have the same experience.

          • Link please. And I am definitely not pro-systemd. I am, however, anti-hyperbole.

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by gweihir ( 88907 )

              "Link please???" The war-cry of the systemd-fanatic that requires all in opposition to prove everything and proves nothing himself? Seriously? How stupid do you think we are?

              • "Link please???" The war-cry of the systemd-fanatic

                You sound like an ass at the moment. I specifically said that I am not pro systemd, far from it. Now a link please, or you are a blowhard too.

  • What would I like to see? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak&yahoo,com> on Friday August 24, 2018 @08:58PM (#57190720) Homepage Journal

    1. A return of hardened gentoo and grsecurity's compliance with the GPL
    2. A proper audit of the kernel and critical components to eliminate defects
    3. A formal analysis of SELinux along the lines of SEL4
    4. 7N reliability
    5. Proper funding of RTLinux and further integration into mainstream
    6. VST and malloc replacement Hoard as part of a standard Linux distro
    7. Third-party maintenance of abandoned architectures
    8. Rewrites of XTank, NV and PHIGS
    9. Ports of Elite: Dangerous and Cubase
    A. Hewlett-Packard's pluggable scheduler
    B. Kernel config supporting hardware detection for suggesting defaults
    C. Usable Gnome and KDE
    D. Replace Systemd with something not made by committee
    E. Addition of Occam-Pi/Guppy, Verified C and SystemC to LLVM
    F. Harness for loading Linux modules onto alternate physical devices

  • I started with FC3. Still running Fedora at home. Amazing.

  • My wish list (Score:3)

    by GerryGilmore ( 663905 ) on Friday August 24, 2018 @09:06PM (#57190754)
    FTR, my first distro was Yggdrasil, followed quickly by Slackware cause they had an easier method for bring in the Adaptec SCSI card.

    For Desktop, I'm currently running Linux Mint which is pretty damned solid and stable and I've installed it on several family members during the Windows 7->8 fiasco and they're all still really, really happy with it.

    What I would like to see Linux Desktop(TM) focus on is overall greater consistency! Starting with sound, all the way through the most basic stuff, the wide plethora of desktops (KDE, Gnome, etc.) and applications is a bloody mess of inconsistency. Having lived through "The UNIX wars", I can tell you that MS' *CONSISTENCY* in everything the user did - along with enabling developers of applications to have a single target platform - led to MS being what it is today. Choice is great, until you're paralysed by the plethora of choices and wind up with a tiny market.
    PS - I could give a bubbly-fart about systemd. All I (as a user) care about is: Does this shit work?

    • I can tell you that MS' *CONSISTENCY* in everything the user did - along with enabling developers of applications to have a single target platform - led to MS being what it is today.

      And just to support that statement, kind of... MS' lack of consistency is what led to Windows Phone being what it is today, too. It's amazing they didn't figure out how to run NT on a PDA earlier. You could actually install Linux on many WinCE PDAs and phones, I had it on both an iPaq H2215 (worked fine) and on a HTC Raphael (which was garbage, but it worked fine there too.)

    • FTR, my first distro was Yggdrasil, followed quickly by Slackware cause they had an easier method for bring in the Adaptec SCSI card.

      For Desktop, I'm currently running Linux Mint which is pretty damned solid and stable and I've installed it on several family members during the Windows 7->8 fiasco and they're all still really, really happy with it.

      What I would like to see Linux Desktop(TM) focus on is overall greater consistency! Starting with sound, all the way through the most basic stuff, the wide plethora of desktops (KDE, Gnome, etc.) and applications is a bloody mess of inconsistency. Having lived through "The UNIX wars", I can tell you that MS' *CONSISTENCY* in everything the user did - along with enabling developers of applications to have a single target platform - led to MS being what it is today. Choice is great, until you're paralysed by the plethora of choices and wind up with a tiny market.
      PS - I could give a bubbly-fart about systemd. All I (as a user) care about is: Does this shit work?

      So ... what you really want is consistency the way YOU want it. Otherwise you would have just stuck with Windows 8 for your family.
      You are given the ability to have what you want with Linux, you are NOT with Microsoft. I think i know what you were getting at, and I think you would want some things to be standardize. But really, I don't mind some of the inconsistencies.. it lets me choose what I want. e.g. XFCE is my choice of DE... I wouldn't enjoy Linux as much with some other one, even though I can ap

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • > FTR, my first distro was Yggdrasil, followed quickly by Slackware

      Same! Did you have the Adaptec ASC-X9160 cards (e.g. 29160) or one of the AHA-29X0 variations (2940)? Did you also have a Zip or Jazz drive? :-) Slackware "just worked." Ah, the days of waiting for an hour+ to compile our kernel.

      I had a Linux book that came with Yggdrasil on CD; downloaded Slackware from the university's T1 line unto ~11x 3.5" disks IIRC -- still remember the 4 "base" disks and the 7 "development" disks. After that I t

  • How time flies (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    1992... my junior year of college... remember running with boot / root disks (5 1/4 floppies, 1.2MB?)... on my shiny new 486. Used it for hacking up some text processing scripts for my information retrieval course, using awk and grep. And for a bit of C coding I seem to recall. Yeah, data structures / algorithms were probably the most important learnings in my CS education, but bumping into Linux was very fortunate and that foundation has served me well. Ha, but now my job consists mostly of getting develop

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tepples ( 727027 )

      Ha, but now my job consists mostly of getting developers off servers and onto serverless solutions.

      What happens once the provider of a particular "serverless" solution goes mammaries-up?

  • Thank you Linus and the Linux community (Score:3)

    by kaoshin ( 110328 ) on Friday August 24, 2018 @09:47PM (#57190858)

    Which Linux-based distro do you use? What changes, if any, would you like to see in it in the next three years?

    I'm a Debian user from a million years ago who regrettably turned to the dark side of Windows as my career pulled me deeper and deeper into the abyss. Last year I cracked and switched back to Linux. I discovered and quickly fell in love with Arch, and I really identified with the Arch principles. I came to realize I may be at odds though on their versatility principle, which as I understood represented choice. This seems to apply to a number of things, but not their init system which I have had some notable frustration with. I'm sure systemd has its merits, but the next system I'm building is going to be Artix+Runit based. Not just because it is systemd free, but I'm encouraged that this seems to be a group which believes more strongly in versatility, and that is a big part of why I came crawling back to Linux. Rather than ask what my distro can do for me next, I can only hope that I can get my skills up again to be able to ask what I can do for my distro.

  • You have to fucking nuts to think Linux hasn't taken off. It's in everything from Chromebooks and routers to your TV and car and near everything else.

  • Kids, when I was your age, I walked uphill in a snow storm 10 miles to download Slackware version 1 on my university's time share, then used Kermit to transfer it to about 25 floppies. It took about three hours. Then I walked uphill in a snowstorm 10 miles back home to install it one floppy at a time on my 486. I got it working and learned basic C programming, UNIX shell commands, EMACS, VI, networking, etc. than I would have learned taking some basic 101-level CS courses. Learning by doing is still the bes

    • Installing Slack 1.2 from its 5 or so 3.5" floppies was how I learned linux (and BIND and vi, since they were dedicated DNS servers that I had to install and configure) back in the mid '90s. I too prefer the learn by doing, though I wouldn't turn down a few CS courses if I could afford them.

      Currently using Gentoo for my server at home that I play on. Tried a few other flavors in the early '00s, but went back to Slack, then switched to Gentoo when I didn't have time for a non-managed-package setup. Used to

  • I started with RHL 5.2 - not RHEL 5.2, but Red Hat Linux 5.2, pre-RHEL and Fedora. I've used every RHL version and then about every other Fedora version until RHEL/WhiteBoxLinux/ScientificLinux/CentOS came out and continued on the EL path, using Fedora just for MythDora "appliance" DVR purposes. I've used Ubuntu here and there and am impressed. My most recent workstation at work is Ubuntu 18 LTS which was a breeze to setup. We're a strong RHEL shop for all things Linux, but I just got tired of fighting

  • The first Linux distro I used was MCC. Which was the first Linux distro.

    I've since used SLS, Slackware, Gentoo, Red Hat, Fedora, Centos, RHEL, Scientific Linux, Rocks, Debian, SuSE, Ubintu, Kubuntu, Mint and Linux From Scratch. Montavista is not really a distro, but I've used that too.

    Of these, I think Ubuntu had the best drivers and Gentoo the best build system. None are quite what I want, so I end up rebuilding most of the system anyway.

    The lack of a Linux Desktop is chiefly down to OSDL botching up that

  • Not captured the consumer market... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    What is this nonsense? Android is a conclusive nail in that coffin.

    The Year of the Linux Desktop has gone the way of the desktop. Not many people are using them outside of work environments and even the work environments are changing. Most people don't need a desktop. They need a portable device that they can pretend to do work on that can maybe handle spreadsheets while watching YouTube. Failing that a device to play Angry Birds while engaged in the WC is sufficient for purpose for maybe 80% of the modern

  • Good lord, it's been a while. Flashback (IIRC) to my first 0.93 install, on a PC with a screaming fast 80386 running at 12 mhz cpu, a meg of ram, and a massive 40 meg hard disk and a 2400 baud modem. I'm not sure I've ever felt a greater sense of accomplishment than seeing a HUGE "X" move around a grey screen the first time I got Xwindows running. That said? it's ages later, and I've had time to ponder. My grievances? I wish Linux had enforced common logging syntax similar to to the VAX/VMS logging system
  • Linux might be 27 years old today, but it's aged me 40.

  • All the way. The day I jumped off the FreeBSD boat and into Linux camp, I chose Debian. I've been with it ever since.

    And personally? I like systemd. It does the job and I find it easier to work with than init scripts. And for those cases I still want to use init scripts, it lets me. Debugging daemon/service issues has never been easier than since systemd dropped. journalctl is great for diagnosing issues. I really don't understand the fuss over it.

  • Wow I feed old now. Have installed, configured and used:

    Slackware 96
    RedHat
    Gentoo (I did the Mom experiment - she used it for years)
    Ubuntu
    Debian/Raspbian

    Special mention to cygwin for keeping me sane whenever I was forced to use Windows.

  • I use Fedora was my workstation, and I love it. There's little a user can't do with Fedora or Linux (outside of playing non Unity-based games; Valve's encouraged many more games to be cross-platform ultimately though).

    What would I change? Whatever regression bugs have been added to and/or existed in GNOME 3. I prefer GNOME over other DEs aesthetically, but after two or more days, the performance of GNOME, especially on modal overlay drawings, is horrific. A reboot is required with Wayland (AFAIK).

    This is so

  • I started with Slackware in late 1996 on a scrapped machine with ESD drives. When 3Com came out with NICs that had MAC addresses unknown to the o.s., I jumped in with my trusty C compiler and added the network driver code necessary to let the new NICs work. That was fun!

    I've also used Suse, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Knoppix, Andy's Ham Radio Linux, DSL, and a few other variants.

    I sneaked Linux into the back door of a Fortune 100 company in the form of DNS servers. When I left many years later, the company h

  • Started with early Slackware, now Ubuntu LTS for servers and Mint (MATE) desktops.. It all just works! Still not totally convinced about systemd...

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