I got on board with Slackware[0] 3 for 80386. Tried Minix a couple of times, also FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, etc. Linux killed them due to community. Among other

I got on board with Slackware[0] 3 for 80386. Tried Minix a couple of times, also FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, etc. Linux killed them due to community. Among other luminaries I met with Jon 'Maddog' Hall[1] a couple of times around 2000-2001, once in Sydney and once in Taiwan. We had various discussions, and I recall he said Linux was going to be "huge" in embedded. In 2008, Android happened. Fast forward another 10 years and now I am in China running a hardware company, and we're yet to see an open mobile offering. Even as my company have migrated from Linux to smaller microcontrollers for most tasks, and as computing and electronics at all layers continue to seep in to the rest of society causing massive changes (social networking, consumer-first walled garden devices, connected TV, mobile payment, everything-aaS etc.) on unsuspecting, status-quo industries, it's interesting to reflect on the continued significance of Linux's culture in shaping the technical community. I don't in any way miss the hardware and bandwidth limitations of those days... but sometimes not having a billion examples on tap forced you to engage more deeply or distinctly with system fundamentals. [0] Today I am a supporter of Gentoo (IMHO the 'spiritual successor' to Slackware) and NixOS. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Hall_(programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Hall_(programmer)