6 ms·

Why Linux Succeeded

51 points by ivanvas 4y ago

phendrenad2 4y ago
GPLv2 Think about it. Most of the reasons people are giving for "why Linux succeeded" also apply to BSD. And these things have all applied to BSD for a long time. Maybe it's some variation on the "first mover principle" where Linux just got there first. But I don't think that's a very good explanation. Personally I think that the license has a lot to do with it.
h2odragon 4y ago
ahem What of the free BSD derivatives? The vision and individual will of Mr Torvalds cannot be discounted as a factor; yes all the communities around Linux did the work but they had not crystallized around a different core. If M$ hadn't been such pure shits in the late 80s and onward, they could have had a lot of that community themselves. I think, in hindsight, the world may have worked out better for it tho. I can imagine a "source available" xenix based world where M$ plays the role of Apple without the lovingkindness. Imagine a human face being stamped by a "windows update" wait screen... forever.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Had Microsoft taken POSIX support on Windows NT more seriously, Linux wouldn't have mattered. As proven by hordes of UNIX developers using macOS and WSL.
  - h2odragon 4y ago
    There might've been an alternate universe where Sun didn't "do" Slowlaris but instead brought an affordable 32bit unix to desktops with SunOS. Linux would've been much less relevant in that world, too.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Indeed, until 2005 I only used Linux at home. Work was all about HP-UX, AIX and Solaris, the exception being CERN in 2002. They were slowly transitioning from Solaris into Linux for the clusters, while most researchers were either adopting OS X or Windows 2000.
    - rhabarba 4y ago
      I will never forgive Oracle for killing the Sun.
      - kaba0 4y ago
        Can we stop blaming every bullshit on Oracle? Every company is just a paperclip-machine optimizing for money (after a not too big size). They will all chop off your hand if you stick it inside without second thought. Kindness, or care from a company only means that pretending that emotion towards something is financially better than not caring, or eradicating that something.
      - pjmlp 4y ago
        Oracle was the only company that even bothered to actually buy Sun assets. Everyone else let it fall down hard on the floor, after management run the company into the ground. It was Oracle that delivered into production the first UNIX with hardware memory tagging, still the best one at it today. It was Oracle that made MaximeVM into a real product with GraalVM. It was Oracle that pushed Java design from its long term stagnation. Yes there were victims along the way. Without Oracle not even the former ones would have taken place.
        rhabarba 4y ago
        Oracle bought Sun because they wanted MySQL. To me, it looks like they noticed everything else in their portfolio only after they bought it. “Oops. We accidentally bought a CPU design, a complete enterprise OS, a virtual machine, an Office suite and quite a handful of other things. Let’s just pretend we didn’t.” Or what exactly has survived the sellout?
        pjmlp 4y ago
        Nothing would have survived, that is the point. Java would have died at version 6, never open source (process was finalized under Oracle's management). GraalVM would never existed. Solaris would have died. All Sun assets would have been taken by the debt collectors and done accordingly.
  - le-mark 4y ago
    I’m curious why Cygwin usually/always gets left out here, it’s been pretty damn good for a long time.
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      Cygwin (which is in fact excellent) was only one of numerous Unix-on-Windows toolkits. Others included MKS Toolkit (from Mortice Kerns Systems) and UWin (from AT&T / David Korn, of Korn Shell fame).
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Because it always provided a half way experience outside of Windows itself, instead of embracing the whole platform.
    - worewood 4y ago
      Cygwin is Awesome. It feels just like I'm in a VM but not a VM? And as it does not require admin rights, it doesn't need IT department blessing unlike WSL.
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    Whatever happened to that? I've read the articles from the time how the NT kernel was designed to have Win32, POSIX and OS/2 as equal ways to talk to the kernel, via the subsystem architecture. And if you dig deep enough in modern Windows you find things that were probably invented for that (like support for case-sensitive names in NTFS), but the feature seems to have vanished as soon as it launched, only to be resurrected two decades later as WSL1. I can just imagine Microsoft-internal politics went against the idea?
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Yes, it was mostly for government contracts. Eventually it got replaced by Interix, which was further replaced by SUA until Windows 8. Naturally nowadays Linux syscalls compatibility relevance grew to the point that even other UNIXes have Linux compatibility layers, so WSL made more sense than plain POSIX.
- rhabarba 4y ago
  It AT&T wouldn’t have been such a PITA in the late 80s, Linux would not exist. BSD became “free” one year too late, sadly.
pjmlp 4y ago
Looking forward to that desktop success.
- cosmodisk 4y ago
  I think at this point it's pretty clear that it will never happen. The specialist software on Linux is often great, but those specialists are technical people. Software for business users is lightyears behind and nobody would convince me to use Gimp(I did try) or Open Office for( Also tried) in a business environment.
  - jka 4y ago
    Can you share one or two aspects of FOSS office software that caused problems for you? (from my perspective, it's a modern miracle to be able to run "apt-get install libreoffice" at a command-line and have freely-available, no-license required office software available within a few moments including nearly like-for-like functionality and file-format compatibility with other office suites)
    - cosmodisk 4y ago
      Sure. I'll take my technical hat off and put 'the average office user' hat on: I login to my Ubuntu account and head to Ubuntu appstore. It's a galore of half baked and a few well developed gems amongst them. "Apt-get install libreoffice" is great for us geeks but if I'd go to my office colleagues and tell them to run some commands in the shell, they'd think I'm mad. I have no doubts that both Gimp and Open office are close to feature parity, but the UX is just not there. The user interface has to be super slick everywhere because an average user is very spoilt. One hope I have is that Windows have been going down the drain usability wise, so hopefully they'll screw up things even worse in Windows 11/12 etc, so the competition could pick up on it.
      - jka 4y ago
        Thanks for the response! > if I'd go to my office colleagues and tell them to run some commands in the shell, they'd think I'm mad. Depends on the colleagues, potentially - I often feel like I underestimate what other people are capable of learning, and that the resulting conversations can seem unintentionally condescending as a result of that (i.e. not preparing and demonstrating what's possible for fear that someone may not understand). > The user interface has to be super slick everywhere because an average user is very spoilt. Yep, that makes sense. However, whether I'm an employee, a business owner, an investor, or a partner who wants to see a business succeed: if I learn that the company is spending on software when there are lower-cost alternatives available that are ignored largely due to look-and-feel concerns.. some cognitive dissonance may develop. Especially if the potential cost savings could be pooled with others towards resolving those issues. (on a potentially more practical note: what I hear from you is that user experience frustration can lead to dissatisfaction with software; I'm not sure what the best routes forward there are, other than encouraging further feedback and finding ways to improve and promote product design in user-facing FOSS)
YakBizzarro 4y ago
Linux and its ecosystem is under the most aggressive EEE cycle from Microsoft in its history. Just look at wsl, github, python,...
- tester756 4y ago
  But let's be honest with yourself GitHub is incredibly good tool, unparalleled even.
  - YakBizzarro 4y ago
    And so is wsl, they have good value. But it's undeniable that they are used as part of eee cycle
  - rhabarba 4y ago
    GitHub is toxic though, it’s focused on social justice these days. Meritocracy is dying and everyone rejoices, probably because they can’t bring merits. Has GitHub stopped violating our licenses already? http://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10_e20170301-tg.htm http://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10_e20170301-tg.htm
  - ahartmetz 4y ago
    Not really. It's easy, but the feature set is rather limited compared to what KDE (the FOSS project I'm closest to) has.
  - kfajdsl 4y ago
    5 years ago, sure, but GitLab?
- pjmlp 4y ago
  They learned from the community adoption of Apple products that the majority only cares about POSIX CLI and not really Linux as such. If they cared, they would be buying Linux OEM hardware instead of giving money to Apple.
- burntoutfire 4y ago
  Wait, what is MS doing with python?
onphonenow 4y ago
Easy answer. The GPLv2 Linus Torvalds —- GPLv3 would have flopped. BSD results in variants and splinters. as a dictator Linus made a ton of good calls - and a dictator making good calls is pretty efficient. The part that makes me laugh is fsf ignoring the views of their number one success as they fragmented copyleft with GPLv3. Linus has built THE most successful community collaboration. Instead the FSF brought in the lawyers
- sneak 4y ago
  The other issue is that the FSF is much more focused on ideology than code. When attempting to be relevant to people who can enrich your product (i.e. hackers), working code is way more important than whether you write letters and a slash before the "linux" part of the name. Linus is a hacker first and foremost, and ideology takes a backseat. FSF has the cart before the horse.
  - cowtools 4y ago
    I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Horse, is in fact, Cart/Horse, or as I've recently taken to calling it, Cart plus Horse.
  - zasdffaa 4y ago
    You think principles unimportant? :)
    - xboxnolifes 4y ago
      Different principles is not a lack of principles.
- rhabarba 4y ago
  > BSD results in variants and splinters. Please count the Linux-based systems.
  - cowtools 4y ago
rhabarba 4y ago
The fact that the article calls Linux a product right from the beginning shows one of its flaws: Unlike other free systems like OpenBSD, Linux suffers from being required to satisfy “the market”. The results: systemd and the choice between being “like Windows” (KDE) or “like macOS” (Gnome). “In some sense, you only hit what you aim at. What was the goal of the Linux community--to replace Windows? One can imagine higher aspirations.” - Bill Joy, 2010.
- iso1631 4y ago
  I vaguely remember using KDE in the Konqueror days, and Gnome in the early foot days, but I haven't used either for 20 years, using black/fluxbox and more recently xfce
  - rhabarba 4y ago
    Xfce started as a CDE clone. I wonder what made them resemble Windows instead.
- msla 4y ago
  > the choice between being “like Windows” (KDE) or “like macOS” (Gnome). Or, you know, neither, like Window Maker.
  - rhabarba 4y ago
    Which I prefer to use myself, but it was born as “like NeXT” (and it still is); so, just another “like an actually successful desktop”.
    - msla 4y ago
      So what "actually successful desktop" are the tiling window managers like? They're probably more successful than Window Maker.
blippage 4y ago
Not to take anything away from Linus, but Linux was also in the right place at the right time. The BSD licensing issues were up in the air at the time and Microsoft had Windows 3.11, which was hardly a technological tour de force. There was a gap that was ripe for exploitation. It could have been Minix that won, or BSD, or the Hurd, but it wasn't, due to various missteps. There's a lot of stuff out there that's good, but didn't make it for "various reasons". Time and chance happen to all men, as it says in the Good Book.
webwanderings 4y ago
Don't underestimate the rise of Internet, websites, and the web servers in pushing the rise of Linux. Linux usage took hold not because people dropped Windows for desktop and adopted Linux. Linux usage took hold due to the increasing adoption of server and its related technologies. Simply put, nobody cared about the mass scale use of Active Directory for ldap and whatever Microsoft was selling as a web server. Linux servers provided better adoption to evolve with the rise of Internet.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
andrewallbright 4y ago
When multiple different people and multiple different circumstances align in just the right way, I do believe it's magical. Literal magic. My experiences as a person tell me that people and egos and circumstances constantly conspire against goals, ambition, and vision. There's always something that stymies a project. Maybe it's someone's ego. Maybe it's a problem that drains someone out completely. Maybe it's just a bad day for someone. When networks of people are able to join together and fight entropy enough to sustain the life of a project... Wow. Just wow. Anyone who added any type of energy into Linux that sustained it for everyone has my admiration.
dboreham 4y ago
I'm guessing the author wasn't a Linux user, and possibly wasn't alive at the time.
boberoni 4y ago
For my personal use cases, I use Windows and macos. For running web apps and hobby projects, I always use Linux (Debian and Ubuntu distros). To me, Linux is the operating system for anything where I only interact with via the command line. This usually means VMs or containers for my web apps and hobby projects. Most cloud environments that I know of (AWS, Linode, Digital Ocean, Vultr, GitHub actions) support Linux. While I have been curious about trying out other OS's like OpenBSD or CoreOS, my experience with Linux seems to be the most portable. It would never occur to me to even try running a web app on a VM or container that isn't Linux.
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  >For my personal use cases, I use Windows and macos. For running web apps and hobby projects, I always use Linux (Debian and Ubuntu distros). It's the same for me. Windows for desktop and Linux for servers.
foobiekr 4y ago
None of these are why. Linux succeeded because the incumbents were so intent on fighting Windows NT without making real changes that they created a terrible situation for developers and operational staff. Entire companies existed to make multi-vendor Unix frameworks and the vendors themselves weren't in great shape by the late-mid-90s. Given the choice between standards and varying compliance (and there were a plenty of these and so #ifdef IRIX... never went away) and just picking one sub-optimal solution that was available on commodity hardware, the outcome was obvious. The same situation is playing out in other industries as well right now.
lovelearning 4y ago
I feel some credit should also go to Canonical and their Ubuntu free CDs in the mid-naughties.
cowmix 4y ago
Linux succeeded because of these reasons: 1) Over time it changed and morphed to include every feature people wanted. It started as a 386, single core kernel whereas now it supports every processor and 1000s of cores. 2) Linux always had the least amount of friction to get stuff working. Back in the early days, trying to get any rando program to compile and work on SunOS, AIX, HPUX, etc -- it was a touch and go / pain the ass process. IF your system had a compiler, you were probably missing any number of dependancies. Linux, you could always get stuff to compile and work. 3) Desktop - Yes, the "year of the desktop" hasn't happened. However, the 30+ years of trying has yielded the best options for a *NIX based environment.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  For those using tarballs distributions like Slackware, not really.
- msla 4y ago
  > Linux always had the least amount of friction to get stuff working. Back in the early days, trying to get any rando program to compile and work on SunOS, AIX, HPUX, etc -- it was a touch and go / pain the ass process. IF your system had a compiler, you were probably missing any number of dependancies. Linux, you could always get stuff to compile and work. Yeah, the proprietary vendors really shot themselves in the foot with unbundling, or the practice of moving packages out of the base install and into "products" people had to buy separately. Linux distros could be batteries included because of the GNU tools and, to some extent, the BSD tools that got ported, not to mention other ecosystems like X and LaTeX and various browsers, etc.
julienreszka 4y ago
Substack is awesome to read. loads fast, great typo, good content exactly what the web should be like
magwa101 4y ago
smitty1e 4y ago
> There was a degree of central organization since the project leader, Linus Torvalds, approved kernel changes and set the philosophical tone, but Linux probably could have survived the removal of its leader. It was decentralized enough to have no single point of failure. I submit that Torvalds' genius could be subdivided into technical heft vs. laissez faire management. He made the in-vs-out calls more or less optimally, and leveraged the "libertaian" feel of the GPL, without getting bogged down by FSF ideology. It was a small target to hit. The pattern might be less difficult to replicate now, but would a Theo de Raadt be able to carry the torch? Torvalds nailed the timing/location problem.

51 points by ivanvas 4y ago

GPLv2 Think about it. Most of the reasons people are giving for "why Linux succeeded" also apply to BSD. And these things have all applied to BSD for a long time. Maybe it's some variation on the "first mover principle" where Linux just got there first. But I don't think that's a very good explanation. Personally I think that the license has a lot to do with it.

h2odragon 4y ago

ahem What of the free BSD derivatives? The vision and individual will of Mr Torvalds cannot be discounted as a factor; yes all the communities around Linux did the work but they had not crystallized around a different core. If M$ hadn't been such pure shits in the late 80s and onward, they could have had a lot of that community themselves. I think, in hindsight, the world may have worked out better for it tho. I can imagine a "source available" xenix based world where M$ plays the role of Apple without the lovingkindness. Imagine a human face being stamped by a "windows update" wait screen... forever.

pjmlp 4y ago
Had Microsoft taken POSIX support on Windows NT more seriously, Linux wouldn't have mattered. As proven by hordes of UNIX developers using macOS and WSL.
- h2odragon 4y ago
  There might've been an alternate universe where Sun didn't "do" Slowlaris but instead brought an affordable 32bit unix to desktops with SunOS. Linux would've been much less relevant in that world, too.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Indeed, until 2005 I only used Linux at home. Work was all about HP-UX, AIX and Solaris, the exception being CERN in 2002. They were slowly transitioning from Solaris into Linux for the clusters, while most researchers were either adopting OS X or Windows 2000.
  - rhabarba 4y ago
    I will never forgive Oracle for killing the Sun.
    - kaba0 4y ago
      Can we stop blaming every bullshit on Oracle? Every company is just a paperclip-machine optimizing for money (after a not too big size). They will all chop off your hand if you stick it inside without second thought. Kindness, or care from a company only means that pretending that emotion towards something is financially better than not caring, or eradicating that something.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Oracle was the only company that even bothered to actually buy Sun assets. Everyone else let it fall down hard on the floor, after management run the company into the ground. It was Oracle that delivered into production the first UNIX with hardware memory tagging, still the best one at it today. It was Oracle that made MaximeVM into a real product with GraalVM. It was Oracle that pushed Java design from its long term stagnation. Yes there were victims along the way. Without Oracle not even the former ones would have taken place.
      - rhabarba 4y ago
        Oracle bought Sun because they wanted MySQL. To me, it looks like they noticed everything else in their portfolio only after they bought it. “Oops. We accidentally bought a CPU design, a complete enterprise OS, a virtual machine, an Office suite and quite a handful of other things. Let’s just pretend we didn’t.” Or what exactly has survived the sellout?
        pjmlp 4y ago
        Nothing would have survived, that is the point. Java would have died at version 6, never open source (process was finalized under Oracle's management). GraalVM would never existed. Solaris would have died. All Sun assets would have been taken by the debt collectors and done accordingly.
- le-mark 4y ago
  I’m curious why Cygwin usually/always gets left out here, it’s been pretty damn good for a long time.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Cygwin (which is in fact excellent) was only one of numerous Unix-on-Windows toolkits. Others included MKS Toolkit (from Mortice Kerns Systems) and UWin (from AT&T / David Korn, of Korn Shell fame).
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Because it always provided a half way experience outside of Windows itself, instead of embracing the whole platform.
  - worewood 4y ago
    Cygwin is Awesome. It feels just like I'm in a VM but not a VM? And as it does not require admin rights, it doesn't need IT department blessing unlike WSL.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  Whatever happened to that? I've read the articles from the time how the NT kernel was designed to have Win32, POSIX and OS/2 as equal ways to talk to the kernel, via the subsystem architecture. And if you dig deep enough in modern Windows you find things that were probably invented for that (like support for case-sensitive names in NTFS), but the feature seems to have vanished as soon as it launched, only to be resurrected two decades later as WSL1. I can just imagine Microsoft-internal politics went against the idea?
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Yes, it was mostly for government contracts. Eventually it got replaced by Interix, which was further replaced by SUA until Windows 8. Naturally nowadays Linux syscalls compatibility relevance grew to the point that even other UNIXes have Linux compatibility layers, so WSL made more sense than plain POSIX.
rhabarba 4y ago
It AT&T wouldn’t have been such a PITA in the late 80s, Linux would not exist. BSD became “free” one year too late, sadly.

pjmlp 4y ago

Looking forward to that desktop success.

cosmodisk 4y ago
I think at this point it's pretty clear that it will never happen. The specialist software on Linux is often great, but those specialists are technical people. Software for business users is lightyears behind and nobody would convince me to use Gimp(I did try) or Open Office for( Also tried) in a business environment.
- jka 4y ago
  Can you share one or two aspects of FOSS office software that caused problems for you? (from my perspective, it's a modern miracle to be able to run "apt-get install libreoffice" at a command-line and have freely-available, no-license required office software available within a few moments including nearly like-for-like functionality and file-format compatibility with other office suites)
  - cosmodisk 4y ago
    Sure. I'll take my technical hat off and put 'the average office user' hat on: I login to my Ubuntu account and head to Ubuntu appstore. It's a galore of half baked and a few well developed gems amongst them. "Apt-get install libreoffice" is great for us geeks but if I'd go to my office colleagues and tell them to run some commands in the shell, they'd think I'm mad. I have no doubts that both Gimp and Open office are close to feature parity, but the UX is just not there. The user interface has to be super slick everywhere because an average user is very spoilt. One hope I have is that Windows have been going down the drain usability wise, so hopefully they'll screw up things even worse in Windows 11/12 etc, so the competition could pick up on it.
    - jka 4y ago
      Thanks for the response! > if I'd go to my office colleagues and tell them to run some commands in the shell, they'd think I'm mad. Depends on the colleagues, potentially - I often feel like I underestimate what other people are capable of learning, and that the resulting conversations can seem unintentionally condescending as a result of that (i.e. not preparing and demonstrating what's possible for fear that someone may not understand). > The user interface has to be super slick everywhere because an average user is very spoilt. Yep, that makes sense. However, whether I'm an employee, a business owner, an investor, or a partner who wants to see a business succeed: if I learn that the company is spending on software when there are lower-cost alternatives available that are ignored largely due to look-and-feel concerns.. some cognitive dissonance may develop. Especially if the potential cost savings could be pooled with others towards resolving those issues. (on a potentially more practical note: what I hear from you is that user experience frustration can lead to dissatisfaction with software; I'm not sure what the best routes forward there are, other than encouraging further feedback and finding ways to improve and promote product design in user-facing FOSS)

YakBizzarro 4y ago

Linux and its ecosystem is under the most aggressive EEE cycle from Microsoft in its history. Just look at wsl, github, python,...

tester756 4y ago
But let's be honest with yourself GitHub is incredibly good tool, unparalleled even.
- YakBizzarro 4y ago
  And so is wsl, they have good value. But it's undeniable that they are used as part of eee cycle
- rhabarba 4y ago
  GitHub is toxic though, it’s focused on social justice these days. Meritocracy is dying and everyone rejoices, probably because they can’t bring merits. Has GitHub stopped violating our licenses already? http://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10_e20170301-tg.htm http://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10_e20170301-tg.htm
- ahartmetz 4y ago
  Not really. It's easy, but the feature set is rather limited compared to what KDE (the FOSS project I'm closest to) has.
- kfajdsl 4y ago
  5 years ago, sure, but GitLab?
pjmlp 4y ago
They learned from the community adoption of Apple products that the majority only cares about POSIX CLI and not really Linux as such. If they cared, they would be buying Linux OEM hardware instead of giving money to Apple.
burntoutfire 4y ago
Wait, what is MS doing with python?

onphonenow 4y ago

Easy answer. The GPLv2 Linus Torvalds —- GPLv3 would have flopped. BSD results in variants and splinters. as a dictator Linus made a ton of good calls - and a dictator making good calls is pretty efficient. The part that makes me laugh is fsf ignoring the views of their number one success as they fragmented copyleft with GPLv3. Linus has built THE most successful community collaboration. Instead the FSF brought in the lawyers

sneak 4y ago
The other issue is that the FSF is much more focused on ideology than code. When attempting to be relevant to people who can enrich your product (i.e. hackers), working code is way more important than whether you write letters and a slash before the "linux" part of the name. Linus is a hacker first and foremost, and ideology takes a backseat. FSF has the cart before the horse.
- cowtools 4y ago
  I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Horse, is in fact, Cart/Horse, or as I've recently taken to calling it, Cart plus Horse.
- zasdffaa 4y ago
  You think principles unimportant? :)
  - xboxnolifes 4y ago
    Different principles is not a lack of principles.
rhabarba 4y ago
> BSD results in variants and splinters. Please count the Linux-based systems.
- cowtools 4y ago

rhabarba 4y ago

The fact that the article calls Linux a product right from the beginning shows one of its flaws: Unlike other free systems like OpenBSD, Linux suffers from being required to satisfy “the market”. The results: systemd and the choice between being “like Windows” (KDE) or “like macOS” (Gnome). “In some sense, you only hit what you aim at. What was the goal of the Linux community--to replace Windows? One can imagine higher aspirations.” - Bill Joy, 2010.

iso1631 4y ago
I vaguely remember using KDE in the Konqueror days, and Gnome in the early foot days, but I haven't used either for 20 years, using black/fluxbox and more recently xfce
- rhabarba 4y ago
  Xfce started as a CDE clone. I wonder what made them resemble Windows instead.
msla 4y ago
> the choice between being “like Windows” (KDE) or “like macOS” (Gnome). Or, you know, neither, like Window Maker.
- rhabarba 4y ago
  Which I prefer to use myself, but it was born as “like NeXT” (and it still is); so, just another “like an actually successful desktop”.
  - msla 4y ago
    So what "actually successful desktop" are the tiling window managers like? They're probably more successful than Window Maker.

blippage 4y ago

Not to take anything away from Linus, but Linux was also in the right place at the right time. The BSD licensing issues were up in the air at the time and Microsoft had Windows 3.11, which was hardly a technological tour de force. There was a gap that was ripe for exploitation. It could have been Minix that won, or BSD, or the Hurd, but it wasn't, due to various missteps. There's a lot of stuff out there that's good, but didn't make it for "various reasons". Time and chance happen to all men, as it says in the Good Book.

webwanderings 4y ago

Don't underestimate the rise of Internet, websites, and the web servers in pushing the rise of Linux. Linux usage took hold not because people dropped Windows for desktop and adopted Linux. Linux usage took hold due to the increasing adoption of server and its related technologies. Simply put, nobody cared about the mass scale use of Active Directory for ldap and whatever Microsoft was selling as a web server. Linux servers provided better adoption to evolve with the rise of Internet.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

andrewallbright 4y ago

When multiple different people and multiple different circumstances align in just the right way, I do believe it's magical. Literal magic. My experiences as a person tell me that people and egos and circumstances constantly conspire against goals, ambition, and vision. There's always something that stymies a project. Maybe it's someone's ego. Maybe it's a problem that drains someone out completely. Maybe it's just a bad day for someone. When networks of people are able to join together and fight entropy enough to sustain the life of a project... Wow. Just wow. Anyone who added any type of energy into Linux that sustained it for everyone has my admiration.

dboreham 4y ago

I'm guessing the author wasn't a Linux user, and possibly wasn't alive at the time.

boberoni 4y ago

For my personal use cases, I use Windows and macos. For running web apps and hobby projects, I always use Linux (Debian and Ubuntu distros). To me, Linux is the operating system for anything where I only interact with via the command line. This usually means VMs or containers for my web apps and hobby projects. Most cloud environments that I know of (AWS, Linode, Digital Ocean, Vultr, GitHub actions) support Linux. While I have been curious about trying out other OS's like OpenBSD or CoreOS, my experience with Linux seems to be the most portable. It would never occur to me to even try running a web app on a VM or container that isn't Linux.

DeathArrow 4y ago
>For my personal use cases, I use Windows and macos. For running web apps and hobby projects, I always use Linux (Debian and Ubuntu distros). It's the same for me. Windows for desktop and Linux for servers.

foobiekr 4y ago

None of these are why. Linux succeeded because the incumbents were so intent on fighting Windows NT without making real changes that they created a terrible situation for developers and operational staff. Entire companies existed to make multi-vendor Unix frameworks and the vendors themselves weren't in great shape by the late-mid-90s. Given the choice between standards and varying compliance (and there were a plenty of these and so #ifdef IRIX... never went away) and just picking one sub-optimal solution that was available on commodity hardware, the outcome was obvious. The same situation is playing out in other industries as well right now.

lovelearning 4y ago

I feel some credit should also go to Canonical and their Ubuntu free CDs in the mid-naughties.

cowmix 4y ago

Linux succeeded because of these reasons: 1) Over time it changed and morphed to include every feature people wanted. It started as a 386, single core kernel whereas now it supports every processor and 1000s of cores. 2) Linux always had the least amount of friction to get stuff working. Back in the early days, trying to get any rando program to compile and work on SunOS, AIX, HPUX, etc -- it was a touch and go / pain the ass process. IF your system had a compiler, you were probably missing any number of dependancies. Linux, you could always get stuff to compile and work. 3) Desktop - Yes, the "year of the desktop" hasn't happened. However, the 30+ years of trying has yielded the best options for a *NIX based environment.

pjmlp 4y ago
For those using tarballs distributions like Slackware, not really.
msla 4y ago
> Linux always had the least amount of friction to get stuff working. Back in the early days, trying to get any rando program to compile and work on SunOS, AIX, HPUX, etc -- it was a touch and go / pain the ass process. IF your system had a compiler, you were probably missing any number of dependancies. Linux, you could always get stuff to compile and work. Yeah, the proprietary vendors really shot themselves in the foot with unbundling, or the practice of moving packages out of the base install and into "products" people had to buy separately. Linux distros could be batteries included because of the GNU tools and, to some extent, the BSD tools that got ported, not to mention other ecosystems like X and LaTeX and various browsers, etc.

julienreszka 4y ago

Substack is awesome to read. loads fast, great typo, good content exactly what the web should be like

magwa101 4y ago

smitty1e 4y ago

> There was a degree of central organization since the project leader, Linus Torvalds, approved kernel changes and set the philosophical tone, but Linux probably could have survived the removal of its leader. It was decentralized enough to have no single point of failure. I submit that Torvalds' genius could be subdivided into technical heft vs. laissez faire management. He made the in-vs-out calls more or less optimally, and leveraged the "libertaian" feel of the GPL, without getting bogged down by FSF ideology. It was a small target to hit. The pattern might be less difficult to replicate now, but would a Theo de Raadt be able to carry the torch? Torvalds nailed the timing/location problem.