5 ms·

But they were correct: if you knew UNIX®️, you automatically groked GNU/Linux (and could see all its deficiencies, as it's a toy), but the other way around does

But they were correct: if you knew UNIX®️, you automatically groked GNU/Linux (and could see all its deficiencies, as it's a toy), but the other way around does not hold: the gaps in architectural and standards specifications knowledge and concepts are gargantuan (I painfully see that every day at work and must teach to ameliorate the situation where I can, as best I can). You mistake cheap, unreliable PC hardware and too late open sourcing with technical inferiority, where there was none. The truth is that garbage PC hardware and ubiquity of Linux ISO's caused a flood of kids who overnight became "system administrators", which along the 1.95 trillion USD being wiped out caused the market to crash. It's not as trivial as you make it out to be. It also takes far, far more professional, formal education, experience and insight to really be root than just being able to install Linux from an ISO and input a few trivial commands in "bash".

saagarjha 7y ago
> It also takes far, far more professional, formal education, experience and insight to really be root You sound like you're gatekeeping system administration.
- zorked 7y ago
  Old school Unix people have been gatekeeping Unix since the 90s at least. Some still resent having a Unix that is available to anyone and runs on home computers.
  - technofiend 7y ago
    >Old school Unix people have been gatekeeping Unix since the 90s at least. Well not all of us, but being a sysadmin excited about Unix/Linux on commodity hardware didn't mean much if your boss thought the OS, the hardware or both weren't ready for production workloads. I showed my boss two floppy Slackware and he dismissed it as not relevant. Years later we were having the same arguments about Solaris on Intel which weren't helped by Sun's on again off again Intel support. My point is sometimes it was the IT management gatekeeping.
hyperman1 7y ago
This comment demonstrates why solaris lost: If you can buy multiple cheap, unreliable PCs for the price of 1 sun server, you still win. If you can employ a bunch of cheap kids, why would you want to get the far more professional guy? The theoretical answer is better quality. But in practice, the speed of adaptation of the new kids fixes that mostly, especially when you are competing against big arrogant, slow moving enterprice stuff. Worst case, you get 99% uptime instead of 99.5, and you pay a lot less.v Well, the market had spoken.
- Annatar 7y ago
  Because in the long term, a bunch of cheap kids who aren't doing system engineering, hacking away on cheap unreliable consumer-grade architecture cost far more than two or three system engineers writing specifications and designing software architecture for hardware designed to protect the integrity of one's data...
  - oblio 7y ago
    And yet here we are, where giant companies full of people with amazing formal educations are being powered by cheap unreliable consumer-grade architectures built on top of unreliable consumer-grade hardware. It turns out, evolution doesn't optimize for architectural beauty. Maybe there was a dinosaur out there with an amazing, lean, clean body structure, yet here I am, happily carrying around my appendix ;) Evolution is ruthless.
    - Annatar 7y ago
      The chickens haven't come home to roost yet.
      - oblio 7y ago
        Amusingly, chickens are dinosaurs. And here we are, eating them :-)
- taborj 7y ago
pjc50 7y ago
> it's a toy This was a shallow dismissal even in the first dotcom boom. Nowadays, when it's in half of phones, most consumer smart appliances, literally every internet company, and even cars, it's just wrong. Linux is the default work tool whether you like it or not. Back in 2001 we had a build farm for Zeus Webserver that targeted something like 20 different versions of commercial UNIX. All of them are now effectively dead, including some spectacular failures like HP-UX on Itanium. > flood of kids who overnight became "system administrators", which along the 1.95 trillion USD being wiped out caused the market to crash No, this is just revisionism. There are very few companies that could have become a success if it was just for having a more expensive server and sysadmin from Sun. At best you might have prevented them from forming at all, along with a bunch of others who did go on to succeed. The cheap commodity hardware is better for the business because you can get results that are as good or almost as good for far lower costs. Worse for you, we are starting to obliterate "root" as a concept. There are vast swathes of machines, physical and virtual, where no human has ever logged in as root at all.
- Annatar 7y ago
  "Nowadays, when it's in half of phones, most consumer smart appliances, literally every internet company, and even cars, it's just wrong. Linux is the default work tool whether you like it or not." Yeah, that's precisely the reason why my TV is so slow and why I have to press buttons on the remote twice or thrice because Linux on ARM is losing events. A toy operating system not fit for production. Linux never evolved into something more mature, and considering what kind of people work on it, never will. They aren't engineers, they're amateurs and it shows. Luckily illumos continues to develop so I can run a real operating system which doesn't have such performance problems... in production.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    You run Solaris on your television?
  - icedchai 7y ago
    Your remote probably just needs new batteries. Solaris was never suitable for embedded devices. Illumos won't even run on ARM. Linux's strength is its versatility: from small embedded systems to big iron.
commandlinefan 7y ago
> professional, formal education, experience and insight As somebody with formal education and experience, I _want_ that to be true, because I want to be hard to find, hard to replace, and really expensive… but just me wanting something to be true unfortunately doesn’t always make it true.
- Annatar 7y ago
  What is true is that nobody is that any more thanks to low skilled Linux labor. Thanks, GNU! Thanks, Linux!
icedchai 7y ago
Must be sarcasm. In the 90's, I was a sysadmin for almost every Unix/Linux under the sun: SunOS 4.x, Solaris 2.x, HPUX, IRIX, Digital Unix, AIX, FreeBSD, various Linux distros. Yes, some of the early "distros" were primitive but by the end of the 90's the writing was on the wall... commercial Unix was dead. "Unreliable" PC hardware is a myth. It was once true, in the early 90's. Today, even low end x86 are rock solid and last for years, running trouble free.

saagarjha 7y ago

> It also takes far, far more professional, formal education, experience and insight to really be root You sound like you're gatekeeping system administration.

zorked 7y ago
Old school Unix people have been gatekeeping Unix since the 90s at least. Some still resent having a Unix that is available to anyone and runs on home computers.
- technofiend 7y ago
  >Old school Unix people have been gatekeeping Unix since the 90s at least. Well not all of us, but being a sysadmin excited about Unix/Linux on commodity hardware didn't mean much if your boss thought the OS, the hardware or both weren't ready for production workloads. I showed my boss two floppy Slackware and he dismissed it as not relevant. Years later we were having the same arguments about Solaris on Intel which weren't helped by Sun's on again off again Intel support. My point is sometimes it was the IT management gatekeeping.

hyperman1 7y ago

This comment demonstrates why solaris lost: If you can buy multiple cheap, unreliable PCs for the price of 1 sun server, you still win. If you can employ a bunch of cheap kids, why would you want to get the far more professional guy? The theoretical answer is better quality. But in practice, the speed of adaptation of the new kids fixes that mostly, especially when you are competing against big arrogant, slow moving enterprice stuff. Worst case, you get 99% uptime instead of 99.5, and you pay a lot less.v Well, the market had spoken.

Annatar 7y ago
Because in the long term, a bunch of cheap kids who aren't doing system engineering, hacking away on cheap unreliable consumer-grade architecture cost far more than two or three system engineers writing specifications and designing software architecture for hardware designed to protect the integrity of one's data...
- oblio 7y ago
  And yet here we are, where giant companies full of people with amazing formal educations are being powered by cheap unreliable consumer-grade architectures built on top of unreliable consumer-grade hardware. It turns out, evolution doesn't optimize for architectural beauty. Maybe there was a dinosaur out there with an amazing, lean, clean body structure, yet here I am, happily carrying around my appendix ;) Evolution is ruthless.
  - Annatar 7y ago
    The chickens haven't come home to roost yet.
    - oblio 7y ago
      Amusingly, chickens are dinosaurs. And here we are, eating them :-)
taborj 7y ago

pjc50 7y ago

> it's a toy This was a shallow dismissal even in the first dotcom boom. Nowadays, when it's in half of phones, most consumer smart appliances, literally every internet company, and even cars, it's just wrong. Linux is the default work tool whether you like it or not. Back in 2001 we had a build farm for Zeus Webserver that targeted something like 20 different versions of commercial UNIX. All of them are now effectively dead, including some spectacular failures like HP-UX on Itanium. > flood of kids who overnight became "system administrators", which along the 1.95 trillion USD being wiped out caused the market to crash No, this is just revisionism. There are very few companies that could have become a success if it was just for having a more expensive server and sysadmin from Sun. At best you might have prevented them from forming at all, along with a bunch of others who did go on to succeed. The cheap commodity hardware is better for the business because you can get results that are as good or almost as good for far lower costs. Worse for you, we are starting to obliterate "root" as a concept. There are vast swathes of machines, physical and virtual, where no human has ever logged in as root at all.

Annatar 7y ago
"Nowadays, when it's in half of phones, most consumer smart appliances, literally every internet company, and even cars, it's just wrong. Linux is the default work tool whether you like it or not." Yeah, that's precisely the reason why my TV is so slow and why I have to press buttons on the remote twice or thrice because Linux on ARM is losing events. A toy operating system not fit for production. Linux never evolved into something more mature, and considering what kind of people work on it, never will. They aren't engineers, they're amateurs and it shows. Luckily illumos continues to develop so I can run a real operating system which doesn't have such performance problems... in production.
- pjc50 7y ago
  You run Solaris on your television?
- icedchai 7y ago
  Your remote probably just needs new batteries. Solaris was never suitable for embedded devices. Illumos won't even run on ARM. Linux's strength is its versatility: from small embedded systems to big iron.

commandlinefan 7y ago

> professional, formal education, experience and insight As somebody with formal education and experience, I _want_ that to be true, because I want to be hard to find, hard to replace, and really expensive… but just me wanting something to be true unfortunately doesn’t always make it true.

Annatar 7y ago
What is true is that nobody is that any more thanks to low skilled Linux labor. Thanks, GNU! Thanks, Linux!

icedchai 7y ago

Must be sarcasm. In the 90's, I was a sysadmin for almost every Unix/Linux under the sun: SunOS 4.x, Solaris 2.x, HPUX, IRIX, Digital Unix, AIX, FreeBSD, various Linux distros. Yes, some of the early "distros" were primitive but by the end of the 90's the writing was on the wall... commercial Unix was dead. "Unreliable" PC hardware is a myth. It was once true, in the early 90's. Today, even low end x86 are rock solid and last for years, running trouble free.