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[OP here] > Red Hat made linux mainstream. 1. In the English-speaking world, mainly meaning North America. For instance, SUSE is just as old, and brought Li
by lproven 3y ago
[OP here]
> Red Hat made linux mainstream.
1. In the English-speaking world, mainly meaning North America.
For instance, SUSE is just as old, and brought Linux to the mainstream in Mitteleuropa. Not just in "DACH" (the German speaking world: Deutschland, Austria, Confœderatio Helvetica), but also for instance it was the first Czech-language distro. I worked for SUSE in Prague for 4 years, and it is still big in that part of the world.
Conectiva brought it to LatAm. TurboLinux to Japan. Etc., etc.
2. FSVO "mainstream" -- Red Hat Linux (note, not RHEL) was not really very useful as a desktop OS. I ran it, I used it, but trying to install something as complex as a desktop using raw RPM with no dependency management was nightmarish. That's where Mandrake came from: Red Hat refused to bundle KDE because Qt wasn't 100% GPL, so Mandrake ported KDE to RHL and bundled them.
Caldera was even earlier, and OpenLinux 1.0 with KDE was the first desktop distro I tried that was polished enough to make my primary OS for a while.
RHL was mainly a server OS, and as such, not very mainstream for most people.
- switch007 3y ago> Confœderatio Helvetica That's Switzerland (or if you're particularly pedantic: the Swiss Confederation) for those not brushed up on their Latin and Latin graphemes.
- dredmorbius 3y agoA name chosen largely as it's not in any one of the four official languages of Switzerland: German, French, Italian, and Romansh. A political compromise.
- switch007 3y agoWell, it’s clearly biased towards Italian and French ;)
- lproven 3y agoI was explaining what DACH stood for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_distribution_of_German_speakers#German-speaking_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_distribution_of_G... TBH I didn't even consider that anyone might not know where Helvetia was, but you're right, I should have mentioned that.
- switch007 3y agoSorry, it just came off a bit pretentious. You could have just written "German-speaking world (e.g. Germany, Austria, Switzerland)"
- lproven 3y agoIt's a standard term: https://ecommercegermany.com/blog/the-complete-guide-to-understanding-the-dach-market https://ecommercegermany.com/blog/the-complete-guide-to-unde... But a lot of people don't know it, and as the terms are in 3 languages, its meaning is not obvious.
- switch007 3y agoIf you’re providing links and explanations of DACH for my benefit, you don’t need to keep giving me links as I knew what DACH meant before reading any of your comments.
- lproven 3y agoNah, it's for the general record. ;-) In another thread today, there are a lot of people upset and angry that they could not work out that a story about how an AI image generator can't create an image of a single banana, called the "AI lone banana problem" or something, did not say clearly that the problem was that an chatbot can't draw just one banana. And the story was really long at nearly 3000 words, which apparently is a 10-15 minute read and also apparently ain't nobody got time for that. The HN commentariat does not always pick up on messages I would consider very obvious indeed... :-/
- oska 3y agoThe acronym was new to me and I found your introduction of it into the conversation interesting, and your brief explanation of it sufficient. (And I didn't in the least find it pretentious)
- lproven 3y ago
- postmodest 3y ago> RHL was mainly a server OS, and as such, not very mainstream for most people. I think that's what gp is saying: in the "enterprise" space, Solaris and HP-UX and Irix were kings. RedHat moved into that space by providing businesses the same model of support, while ALSO having a desktop version/free version for people to learn on. RedHat THINKS they're still doing that with Fedora/CentOS Stream, but everyone disagrees.
- happymellon 3y agoI don't think Red Hat thinks they are doing it with CentOS and Fedora. They are doing that with the free developer licencing.
- lproven 3y ago> RedHat moved into that space by providing businesses the same model of support But it didn't, not back then. In the 1990s, and for most of the company's first decade in business, it offered a free distribution and made most of its money from selling merchandise. Which is to say, not very much money at all. It's only around 2003 but its management hit upon the idea of having a premium enterprise distribution, and making the only way to obtain it being to buy commercial support for it. That was a stroke of genius, and over the last 20 years, it's made the company very rich indeed — in stark contrast to its first decade. > while ALSO having a desktop version/free version for people to learn on. Again, that split only came after about a decade in business. For its first 10 years or so, there was only the free version. Also, more to the point, back when Solaris and HP UX were big, Red Hat was still very small and mainly in the business of selling T-shirts and mouse mats. It's a bit of a generalisation, but to an extent, it was Microsoft Windows which put commercial UNIX out of business, followed by Apple macOS which showed that UNIX on the desktop could be as good or better than Windows. Windows established a marketplace of COTS high-end x86 kit with decent graphics capabilities and capable storage subsystems. Apple successfully piggybacked on that to make desirable easy to use RISC UNIX workstations for consumers, using their own processors but otherwise pretty much off the shelf PC industry parts. And those things put together are what created a marketplace in which Linux could thrive and compete effectively. When Linux was first invented, a high end PC had a crappy VGA card on the ISA bus, and many of them didn't even have mice, sound or networking as standard. I was there. It was grim.
- jen20 3y agoAgreed (as someone in the English-speaking world whose first Linux distribution was SUSE) - though even SUSE uses rpm, as does TurboLinux, so in a very real way, they are standing on the shoulders of Red Hat.
- krupan 3y agoSUSE definitely deserves credit here too! But also SUSE doesn't get hated on like Red Hat