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Nothing is ever certain when discussing conter-factuals, but if Linux had not had a few years of little competition in the x86 space then yes I think the BSD va
by evgen 10y ago
Nothing is ever certain when discussing conter-factuals, but if Linux had not had a few years of little competition in the x86 space then yes I think the BSD variants would have become the dominant strain. They were better studied and known in the academic space vs the SysV-influenced core of Linux and the BSD strains have always had better support for the various bits of random hardware out there. Remember that at this time there was no particular assurance that Intel would reach the position of dominance that it currently holds, it was Intel 386 vs Moto 68k vs MIPS with a few Alphas for high-end shops. Linux as an alternative sysv-like kernel with a bsd userland would have worked as well as a world of all *BSD.
- pjmlp 10y agoI can tell you that the *BSD weren't used at all on my university. All our labs were running a mix of Aix and DG/UX, which got slowly replaced by GNU/Linux around Slackware 2.0 timeframe.
- evgen 10y agoI guess it was situational then, but </big_generalization> all top universities in the US had loads of boxes running BSD variants at this time, ranging from big-iron Vaxen down to NeXT cubes and Sun workstations. I am trying to think of a major NSFNet participant that was not producing some open-source BSD-ready software at the time and not many come to mind.