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Linux was mostly a toy at first. I see no reason MINIX couldn't be as successful.
by marcodiego 5y ago
Linux was mostly a toy at first. I see no reason MINIX couldn't be as successful.
- anthk 5y agoLinux in late 90's was a beast. FVWM+RXVT used far less memory and CPU than the tipical SUN Station and with a fraction of the price.
- p_l 5y agoMinix 2 design pretty much ensured it couldn't be anything more - a lot of early Linux code was about replacing Minix code with something that made it less of a joke, and the experience was fuel for the tanenbaum-linus flamewar (for example, Linus had reentrant, "multithreaded" I/O whereas Minix couldn't due to how it handled I/O). It was only Minix 3 when care was taken to include possibly more complex but important techniques instead of forsaking them for simplicity
- edgyquant 5y agoNot really. Linus thought he was building a toy kernel but as soon as it was released it became a real OS as people got it working on their systems, got all GNU programs running, etc. The X windowing system was ported in less than a year so it was a full fledged OS immediately. As for minux, at the time Linux was released microkernels weren’t considered practical outside of research OSs until the mid-to-late 90s and even today Mac OS is the only widely used micro kernel OS. This is a big topic of Linus debate with Tannenbaum. I don’t recall the exact reasons but iirc microkernels we’re/are slower than a monolith and at a time when computing power was much lower they didn’t make sense for workstations.