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In 1998, Linux was still behind SunOS/Solaris in maturity and even if it had been even, Intel x86 hardware wasn't remotely on par with what Sun machines could d
by ThrowawayR2 7y ago
In 1998, Linux was still behind SunOS/Solaris in maturity and even if it had been even, Intel x86 hardware wasn't remotely on par with what Sun machines could do.
- kazinator 7y agoSpeaking of Sun machines, in 1997, I was running Red Hat 2 Linux on a Sun SparcStation 20 at Nortel.
- kragen 7y agoI was using Linux and Solaris in 1998, and doing things on Solaris was a constant pain compared to doing the same things on Linux. (Sun was still trying to push CDE at that point, for crying out loud.) I compiled KDE and Samba for our Sun and dramatically increased its utility. There were things that Solaris was better at in 1998: big iron things, NUMA things, fault-tolerance things, what we now call "observability". (I still don't have a good equivalent for pstack on Linux!) But Linux was enormously better at many other things, including, most crucially, networking. That was about the time the Top500 list started morphing into a list of the top 500 Beowulfs.