9 ms·

The early days of Linux (2023)

463 points by stmw 2y ago

Philpax 2y ago
[2023], but that doesn't matter much. Fantastic article! Great to see what development was like at the start - I'd always heard anecdotes, like its humble beginnings and the MINIX argument, but I'd never had context for them before.
- stmw 2y ago
  My bad, dang just pointed this out as well: Discussed at the time (of the article): The early days of Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35557848 - April 2023 (224 comments) I just came across it and didnt' realize it appeared on Hn almost 2 years before.
  - forbiddenlake 2y ago
    It's fine, dupes are allowed after an amount of time.
imiric 2y ago
> More importantly for the future success of Linux was that the X11 system was ported to it, making 1992 the year of the Linux desktop. I'm glad that's finally settled. :) Great read!
LorenDB 2y ago
Also worth a read: Just for Fun https://www.amazon.com/Just-Fun-Story-Accidental-Revolutionary/dp/0066620732 https://www.amazon.com/Just-Fun-Story-Accidental-Revolutiona...
- juhanakristian 2y ago
  Read this about ten years ago. Pretty short read but highly recommended.
ylee 2y ago
I knew the very basics of the story, but did not know/hadn't put it together in my mind that kernel 1.0 appeared in mid-1994, and not somewhere in the 1991-1993 timeframe as I had vaguely assumed. Certainly, the Red Hat Linux 2.1 (kernel 1.2.13) I installed in December 1995 (making my home 100% Microsoft-free ever since) felt pretty feature-complete.
indigodaddy 2y ago
lwn.net - Such a beautiful website, just kind of perfect on mobile. Anyone know if it's using a commonly known CMS? builtwith doesn't glean much..
- jzb 2y ago
  It’s a custom CMS built using Quixote.
  - linsomniac 2y ago
    Joe Brockmeier. Well there's a name I haven't heard in a very long time. Sean Reifschneider here, if you remember.
    - jzb 2y ago
      I do, though it's been quite a while. Hope all is well with you!
linsomniac 2y ago
One thing I often think about in the early days of Linux is it's competitors. The article mentions "commercial Unix was so expensive it was easier to write your own". Which is largely true. However there is also Coherent Unix. I remember adverts for it as the full back page of so many magazines of the day, for $99. I always was on the fence about buying it. One of the big drawbacks of Coherent was that it didn't have any networking. Then, Linux came out, and it was shockingly shortly after that that Linux surpassed Coherent, and Coherent vanished seemingly overnight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system)
- arp242 2y ago
  Reading a review from Dec 1990[1], it doesn't seem that brilliant: "Coherent remains true to Unix's roots and eschews local area networking, graphical user interfaces, menus, mice, and many of the other amenities that present-day DOS users and Unix users have come to expect of modern software." It goes on to describe that "learning Unix from Coherent would be a bumpy road" and "nor could you realistically use Coherent to automate a small business". Coherent was closed-source, so you couldn't take an imperfect incomplete system like Linux and help improve it. Linux attracted contributors early on not because Linux at the time was so great, but because people liked to work on this kind of thing. $99 is ~$230 today. I know software used to be a lot more expensive in general (e.g. $25 for PKZIP in the late 80s), but $230 for a bare-bones OS for playing around is only "cheap" relative to Enterprise Unix™® pricing. [1]: https://books.google.ie/books?id=JZxkO0PpksUC&pg=PT61&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.ie/books?id=JZxkO0PpksUC&pg=PT61&redir_...
  - ForTheKidz 2y ago
    Did it not have some kind of ncurses functionality? So much of what I see about software from the eighties (mostly via movies) seems operable with just an unnetworked unix terminal.
- jmclnx 2y ago
  >However there is also Coherent Unix. I was a customer and it was very good, I use to use kermit to dial into a Sun System at work and it would call me back so I would avoid charges. That was to get USENET and general Internet access. Fun times. It is too bad they had to fold, be to be honest by 1995 the writting was on the wall, When they folded, I went to Slackware, which I still use. Back then, Linux was changing almost daily. Coherent had one thing that Linux could not do, but via USENET I asked and someone supplied a patch for me within days. It would allow me to use 2 monitors with 2 cards on my 386sx, a BW and a VGA just like what Coherent was able to do. People were far more accessible back then until the fortune 500 companies got involved in the 2000s.
linwangg 2y ago
It's fascinating that the name 'Linux' was actually chosen by Ari Lemmke, not Linus himself. Details like this highlight the role of community and serendipity in the history of open-source software.
- zaikunzhang 2y ago
  Quoting Wikipedia [1], which provides a bit more details (as of 2025-03-03): Linus Torvalds had wanted to call his invention Freax, a portmanteau of "free", "freak", and "x" (as an allusion to Unix). During the start of his work on the system, he stored the files under the name "Freax" for about half of a year. Torvalds had already considered the name "Linux", but initially dismissed it as too egotistical. [2] In order to facilitate development, the files were uploaded to the FTP server (ftp.funet.fi) of FUNET in September 1991. Ari Lemmke at Helsinki University of Technology (HUT), who was one of the volunteer administrators for the FTP server at the time, did not think that "Freax" was a good name. Therefore, he named the project "Linux" on the server without consulting Torvalds. [2] Later, however, Torvalds consented to "Linux". To demonstrate how the word "Linux" should be pronounced ([ˈliːnɵks]), Torvalds included an audio guide with the kernel source code. [3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux#Naming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux#Naming [2] Torvalds, Linus; Diamond, David (2001). Just For Fun - The Story Of An Accidental Revolutionary. New York: HarperBusiness. p. 84. ISBN 0-06-662072-4. [3] Torvalds, Linus (March 1994). "Index of /pub/linux/kernel/SillySounds" (https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/SillySounds/ https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/SillySounds/). Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20091008074754/http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/SillySounds/ https://web.archive.org/web/20091008074754/http://www.kernel...) from the original on October 8, 2009. Retrieved August 3, 2009.
dang 2y ago
Discussed at the time (of the article): The early days of Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35557848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35557848 - April 2023 (224 comments)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
qingcharles 2y ago
TIL: Linus is a Swedish speaking Finn; and those are a thing. This sound has lived rent-free in my head since 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Linus-linux.ogg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Linus-linux.ogg
- rottc0dd 2y ago
  Wow! I think he got different in his English diction much later in his life?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- stmw 2y ago
  Indeed, he is part of the Swedish minority in Finland... I thought everyone (on HN) already knew that?
  - qingcharles 2y ago
    Nope! Slipped me by and I'm a language nerd who literally worked for Nokia (only one trip to the mothership though) and spent my teens deep in the Finnish demoscene and the rest of the 90s knee-deep in Linux.
  - emmelaich 2y ago
    Many Fins can speak Swedish. Around 10pc? It is an official language. When I met Linus T in 1994/5 I asked why he spoke Swedish and not Finnish and he rolled his eyes. Was so sick of the question even then. https://linuxjournal.rubdos.be/ljarchive/LJ/008/2867.html https://linuxjournal.rubdos.be/ljarchive/LJ/008/2867.html
    - pimeys 2y ago
      Yeah. Speaking swedish especially in the coastal area of Finland is quite common. My father in law mixes both languages together in a funny way in his talk. It's kind of funny, but also pretty common among the Finnish-Swedes...
hnthrowaway0315 2y ago
Such an inspiring read! Thanks for writing and/or sharing. One of my many future hermit projects is to hack on an early version of Linux. ------------ Please ignore just jotting down for future myself --------------- (Actually I want to study Win NT more than Linux as it brought me good memories, but Win NT was designed as a mature product from the beginning, and even the leaked 3.5 source code is way too much for me.) I checked the version history and 0.11 seems to be a good start. Reasons: - There is this book (https://download.oldlinux.org/ECLK-5.0-WithCover.pdf https://download.oldlinux.org/ECLK-5.0-WithCover.pdf) which follows the style of Lion's Unix v6 book and uses the 0.12 kernel as reference; - 0.11 doesn't have a virtual memory or a virtual terminal, and they are among the software I'd like to implement; - 0.11 does have the basic stuffs so I assume it is not too difficult to set it up with QEMU and QEMU-gdb; The list of software to implement in mind: - a Debugger (I'll probably use QEMU-gdb, but if I can write a simple step-in debugger maybe it makes it a bit easier to dogfood? Still too early though as there is no compiler on it) - a Virtual Memory system (following the MIT xv6 lab, maybe a bit more advanced as I will complete the MIT xv6 labs before pursuing this venture); - a Virtual terminal (not sure how much I can implement, maybe just a basic one with limited control sequence support); - a USB driver (not sure if it's possible for 0.11, I have never written a driver before); - a mouse driver (again probably too difficult for me); - a LOT of CLI programs as warm-up. Basically simpler versions of modern ones (less switches); - a text editor. I never liked the key layout of emacs or vim so this is going to be my own thing. I care a lot about moving caret around without using a mouse; - a very basic GUI system. Nothing fancy, just something that can show windows and some widgets. Maybe don't even care about multiple windows. Showing one window with a menu and some buttons probably needs a lot of effort; - a compiler/linker of a simple language (can't dogfood without an editor, a compiler, a linker and a debugger I think) Preparations: - I need to complete all MIT RISC xv6 labs; - I need to figure out how to write drivers for USB and mice; - I want to investigate how X11 and Win32 GUI were implemented and figure out the architecture; - I need to figure out how to write terminals and text editors. There are tons of tutorials online so shouldn't be too tough; - I need to study compiler theory, just continue reading Crafting Interpreters should be good enough; - I need to figure out a comfortable development and debugging environment;
- qingcharles 2y ago
klysm 2y ago
It’s a weird feeling to be young enough to never have experienced a world without Linux, but be close enough in time to its creation that many of the people involved are still around. My entire professional career has mostly revolved around it in some capacity. My entire life even since age like 12? It’s pretty crazy to think about the impact it has had on my life
- ahazred8ta 2y ago
  Note the classic "Linux is a 10 year old boy" ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7ozaFbqg00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7ozaFbqg00
- weinzierl 2y ago
  I feel similar for Computer Science as a whole field. It's weird to think that many of its founding fathers were still during a significant portion of my life. Claude Shannon 2001 Edsger Dijkstra 2012 John McCarthy 2011 Niklaus Wirth 2024 Konrad Zuse 1995 Alonzo Church 1995 Jim Gray 2007/2012 Grace Hopper 1992 Even Alan Turing could still have been alive during my lifetime hadn't he been murdered. Friedrich L. Baur, who died in 2015, still had an office at my university when I studied there and I often passed by, saw his name plate, and wondered if this was all real. Luckily Donald Knuth is still around.
  - neontomo 2y ago
    Alan Turing took his own life on purpose or by accident, he wasn't murdered
    - flohofwoe 2y ago
      If you read up on how the UK government treated him after the war, it was essentially murder even if they didn't outright execute him.
      - bigstrat2003 2y ago
        No, words mean things. If they didn't actually pull the trigger, it wasn't murder. That isn't to say it was ok to treat Turing the way they did, because it wasn't ok. But it's important to not pollute the meaning of words by misusing them for greater rhetorical impact.
baskint 2y ago
early 90s, i286 story reminded me purchasing my i386 SX (4 MBs RAM, perhaps 20 MB HD), running DOS 5, then DOS 6 could not afford the DX edition for some reason. i286s were just phasing out then. amazing how linux started. thanks for sharing!
homebrewer 2y ago
See also, by the same author: https://liw.fi/linux20 https://liw.fi/linux20
zidoo 2y ago
“ We had all the overconfidence of 20-year-old second-year university students.” - and this is how you change the world
- timewizard 2y ago
  That's how you start. It's also important to recognize that much of the UNIX and eventually POSIX framework was laid out. They were filling in a small gap and making it free. Which is really the most amazing part to me.
qwertox 2y ago
It's odd how Linux has become the only stable thing in this world. You turn it on and you know that over time it will only become better without any bad intentions.
- xtracto 2y ago
  This is so important to me on this day and age. Most new technology and OS seem to have an agenda. They want to "push" me to do things: buy an iPhone, buy an office subscription , etc. Using Linux is a breath of fresh air in that respect for me. I just want my toaster tu toast bread. I don't want it to tell me what bread should I buy.
  - nehal3m 2y ago
    Wouldn't want to toast unauthorized bread.
    - xattt 2y ago
      You wouldn’t steal heat from a toaster.
  - jmclnx 2y ago
    >I just want my toaster I think I heard the NetBSD toaster is out of support :(
  - alt227 2y ago
    But we ALL want our toasters to ask us if we want any toast
  - sgarland 2y ago
    This is why I dislike Ubuntu – I don't like Snaps, and I don't want them to be considered the default.
- DoingIsLearning 2y ago
  Every well can be poisoned. Linux relies on people's values and people's skills. Neither of which are immune to degradation over time. Much like the post world war civil society, economic and diplomatic development was an exception in Human history. Assuming the reality we have will remain forever without protection or constant maintenance effort is dangerous.
linuxhansl 2y ago
Fun. I started using Linux at 0.98 (forgot the patch level), in 1992. Had a modem and connected to a lot of bulletin boards. I felt very much a like "WarGames" hero, calling phone numbers and all :) I still remember the day when I used ppp to connect to the actual Internet for the first time. After a lot of trial and error, I finally pinged www.linux.org, and it resolved the hostname and returned the ping. I was silent first, and all I could say then was "whoa". Oh fun times. :)
- api 2y ago
  My first net connection was using slirp via a shell account. Slirp was a CSLIP emulator that ran in user space on the shell box on the remote side. Back in those days multi user shell machines were quite common and some of the first ISPs offered Internet access that way. Mine was an ISP called Internet Access Cincinnati that gave each user shell on a Sun Sparc 10 running SunOS (pre-Solaris). You also got POP e-mail and a -username home folder accessible via web.
  - jks 2y ago
    Slirp lives on in QEMU and container engines: https://github.com/rootless-containers/slirp4netns https://github.com/rootless-containers/slirp4netns
  - jabl 2y ago
    Ha, Running slirp in the ISP shell box was also how I first got beyond bbs'ed onto the wild west of the internet. Also getting online was one of my first motivations for using Linux, as the Trumpet winsock networking library for Windows 3.1 was terrible and crashed the entire computer all the time.
DeathArrow 2y ago
>More importantly for the future success of Linux was that the X11 system was ported to it, making 1992 the year of the Linux desktop. Yet some people await for a second coming.
ggm 2y ago
Was used to using pdp11/vax based systems moving to Suns and other workstations, and for a number of reasons the initial launch floppies of linux felt "under cooked" compared to the BSD systems also being released for larger Intel chips with MMU. But, the killer side of this was the linux code ran on smaller Intel boxes, probably a little better than Minix did. when 386BSD got it's act together, it became less apparent but very quickly impetus got behind the distro "scene" and Linux took off like a rocket. Those first early days, no real network stack, minimal desktop support, it was line-and-ball. Mainly, I think the BSD lawsuit/licence issues was the negative energy source in BSD occupying the ground. I had an IBM PC/RT at the time running the 4.3bsd port which was just lovely. But such clunky hardware. PCs were coming into their own and IBM didn't want to keep playing in multiple OS and had AIX coming through and the ROMP chip was getting old. Once graphics display cards on PCI emerged along with decent cheap ethernet cards, and then ethernet on the motherboard I think it was game over. (although for obvious reasons most people's experience of network was modem on serial)
openplatypus 2y ago
Slackware 3.6/4.0 back in 1998-99 Never forget. The joy of startx command working (sometimes) Fun times.
- keyle 2y ago
  I remember when I had to choose whether I was a slackware guy or a debian guy! I chose slackware like many french speaking fellas around. Oh, the times. PS: debian all the way since.
  - anta40 2y ago
    Slackware 11 was all I had in PC as univ student circa 2006-2008 (yep, just said goodbye to Win XP). All the tools I need to do assignments were provided in 3 CDs. At that time, fast internet connection was considered a bit expensive. Now I'm happy with Debian.
udev4096 2y ago
There's this amazing documentary on linux, from 2003. It's called Revolution OS. Highly recommended! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0RYQVkQmWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0RYQVkQmWU
- rixed 2y ago
  I second that. The best documentary I've ever seen about Linux and GNU.
infp_arborist 2y ago
For the biggest part of my life it seemed that all these technical accomplishments were the work of untouchable geniuses, but reading this story is also very telling about the value of long-term friendship and financial/societal stability to support each other's explorations.
- jxjnskkzxxhx 2y ago
  Bad example. Linus is a genius.
pjmlp 2y ago
> The term "open source" was coined and IBM invested a ton of money in Linux development. A relevant key point regarding why Linux actually took off, versus other UNIX clones. And how that eventually came around with Red-Hat's acquision and its influence on GCC, GNOME, Wayland, RPM,... contributions.
susam 2y ago
> The first Linux distribution was also started in 1992: Softlanding Linux System or SLS. The next year, SLS morphed into Slackware, which inspired Ian Murdock to start Debian in 1993, in order to explore a more community-based development structure. A few other distributions would follow in the years to come. And follow they did! The Great Linux Distribution Timeline at <https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Di...> presents an impressive graph of the countless distributions that descended from Slackware, Debian, etc. This graph is still actively maintained by the community here: <https://github.com/FabioLolix/LinuxTimeline https://github.com/FabioLolix/LinuxTimeline>.
jasoneckert 2y ago
I remember the early days of Linux well. There was quite a bit of interest for it at the University of Waterloo in the mid 90s, but there was also a lot of talk of issues getting it to install, or getting it to run stably on certain systems (albeit not uncommon for any OS at the time). Those were the days of having to know how to compile your own kernel and fight with XFree86. Linux distributions like Red Hat really squashed those concerns within a short time and made things much easier on all fronts. Their documentation was also excellent. By the late 1990s, Red Hat was as common as Solaris, AIX, and IRIX at the university, but most still considered it inferior to Solaris. And now, RHEL is the main *nix system used there (a few use Debian).
- ttyprintk 2y ago
  I think this is consistent with big universities at the time. I remember when Alpha was becoming discontinued, reinstalling RedHat on those did give Linux a boost as a daily driver for researchers.
  - jasoneckert 2y ago
    Linux definitely breathed life into that great platform. I still have an Alpha Personal Workstation 600au in my basement running Red Hat from that time period.
    - cbm-vic-20 2y ago
      I had a Jensen (DECpc AXP 150) and an Alpha Multia; there were the first targets for Windows NT 3.51 on Alpha, but I had early Alpha Linux running on them. These might still be buried in the basement of my parents' house. Not as cool as the OSF/1-based DECserver 2100 "Sable" at work. I loved that machine.
- ajross 2y ago
  > Those were the days of having to know how to compile your own kernel and fight with XFree86. It was the XF86Config modeline HOWTO that taught me how a CRT controller works.
- 2y ago
sgarland 2y ago
Great read. My first Linux distro was, I think, Slackware, around kernel version 2.2 - 2.4. I played with a _lot_ of distros; I think Sorcerer was the most esoteric. I settled on Gentoo, as one does, and spent more time compiling / breaking / fixing than I did using anything. I eventually valued stability over bleeding-edge, and have happily been using Debian ever since.
looofooo0 2y ago
They confusing Linux and GNU/Linux in that article.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  They're not bothering to draw a distinction that almost nobody cares about, yes.
  - looofooo0 2y ago
    One should make one as it otherwise makes it hard to read, because there is no distinction between the operating system and the kernel. Saying Linux can compile itself is just nonsense as it clearly needs GNU GCC or another compiler. But of course you can have a Linux operating system without a compiler. Using Linux as either Linux the Kernel or a operating system with the Linux kernel interchangably is just imprecise gibberish. Almost as bad as intellectual property.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tonnydourado 2y ago
> My name is Lars Wirzenius, and I was there when Linux started. "I was there, Gandalf. I was there 3000 years ago" XD
segmondy 2y ago
It's amazing how good and stable it got really fast. I was able to install it and use it with X and for everything in 1994 while still in high school. It's been my only OS ever since and set the path for my career and life.
9front 2y ago
We will always have Linux, the kernel, but the desktop experience is being sabotaged by Microsoft with WSL.
- markus_zhang 2y ago
  I have been using Ubuntu as my main drive for a couple of weeks and I have to admit it's still clearly not ready for the masses.
- linguae 2y ago
  I disagree with the notion that Microsoft is sabotaging the Linux desktop via WSL. In my opinion, I believe it’s the Sisyphean development churn of the FOSS desktop ecosystem that held the Linux desktop back. However, the industry-wide move away from native apps toward Web apps, combined with growing dissatisfaction with Windows in some circles and with the high cost of switching to a Mac (especially for those who need more RAM than what Apple sells by default), has provided a large lifeline for the Linux desktop. The Linux desktop has had a rough history. The original problem was the original KDE using a non-FOSS Qt, which led to the development of GNOME, splintering the FOSS desktop ecosystem into two competing desktops, spreading already-thin resources. Granted, things were good in the mid-2000s, when GNOME 2 and KDE 3 were current, and when it appeared that the Linux desktop would be poised to make significant inroads against Windows XP, just like how Firefox in 2005 formed a formidable challenge to Internet Explorer. Even OpenOffice appeared to seriously challenge Microsoft Office at the time. In my opinion, there have been many setbacks since the late 2000s. GNOME 3’s very controversial changes led to the splintering of the GNOME/Gtk community (Cinnamon and MATE). KDE 4 was not well received, though KDE 5 is widely praised. GNOME and other projects (though not KDE) was heavily influenced by mobile computing paradigms led by a misguided belief that desktops will become obsolete. The transition from X11 to Wayland has been quite rocky, to say the least. Interestingly enough, what has improved the competitiveness of the Linux desktop these days has been the shift away from native apps and toward both the Web and Electron apps. While as a long-time former Mac user I lament the decline of native apps and the loss of consistency, apps built on Web technologies are cross-platform or even platform-agnostic. If one doesn’t need native Windows and macOS apps, then the barrier to switching to a Linux desktop is much lower. Even the gaming situation has dramatically improved on Linux.
helpfulContrib 2y ago
I was 22 years old, hacking away in Progress 4GL, maintaining data centers across the country using a combination of Quarterdesk DesqView and "Remote Control", which gave a way to control a keyboard/mouse/monitor over a modem connection. Every field office had 2 or 3 PC's dedicated to the task of providing a "remote terminal" to our development team, so that we could dial in remotely and do administrative things to the Progress 4GL database server that was running on another dedicated system for the task, usually a fat Novell Netware server with 4 or 8 "huge" disks of 640Megabytes dedicated to the databases. It was my job to monitor the rows and rows of PC's on our side of things, that were used for remote admin. Honestly, I despised this job. I'd spent most of the 80's learning C and Unix programming - my first Unix machine was a MIPS Computing Magnum pizzabox running risc/OS. $15,000 worth of machine, sitting on my desk - but yet I still had to walk down the corridor and hack around on cheap DOS PC's just to get things fixed across the country in some hellish New Hampshire closet. At least it paid me well. Well enough that I could go to the regular PC Computer swap meets out in Pasadena every weekend or so, and buy myself the parts needed to build a "decent computer for home" - a 486 with 8Megabytes of RAM, a few hundred megabytes of disk space. A CD-ROM drive, maybe a high-end video card and monitor capable of 1025x768 and 256 colours. A modem, so I could work from home, run my own DesqView instance, have my own multiple-terminal connections to all those troublesome field offices. I'd also make regular (weekly) jaunts to The Opamp Bookstore, in Hollywood - one of my favourite places in all the world. It was there I'd wandered into the "Unix" section and seen some magazines and books on the MINIX operating system, and it was there that I learned about the rise of Usenet as a place to get to meet other hackers, C programmers, Unix nerds. It was also where I'd get my 2600 Magazine fix, monthly. One day, I got my home PC finally built, booted, and running. I connected to my mailserver, wnsnews.com .. checked my mail. A fellow operator had sent me a message "Check out the minix-list, they're talking about a new unix-like kernel you might be interested in..." So I subscribe, and lo and behold, there it was - the link to ftp.funet.fi, Linux in its very early stages. It took me about a day to download it, about a week to figure out all the various floppy disks I'd have to make to get the drivers for everything set up, and a whole weekend of faffing around to get things installed alongside my Desqview setup, on a brand new hard drive. I was hooked. It didn't have everything - X11 wasn't ported yet - but it had just enough for me to port some of my own C code, see that things could actually work like my MIPS pizzabox, albeit on my cheaper 486, and .. maybe .. someday .. someone would port "Remote Control" or even the Desqview terminals, to this brand new 'Linux' thing. Some months later, in the middle of being shut down entirely by my fellow grey-beard programmers, who wanted me to stop fiddling about with all the spare parts in our "Remote Control" room, I learned about this brand new Linux 'distribution', Yggdrasil. A trip to OpAmp book shop, and there it was: the bootable floppy and the full Linux filesystem, included on CD, to turn any of our machines into a working Linux system - with X11 onboard! And, probably working, if I chose our SVGA card settings right! What a revelation! I could use my home 486 as a decent terminal for my pizzabox! I could use telnet to get into the Novell servers across the other side of the country! I could endlessly annoy my grey-beard associates with the idea that "Linux is the Future, man!", over and over again, until they finally lock me out of the Novell server and decide I was only good for Unix things, as punishment, because as they knew full well "Unix is Dead, man!" Well, the decades have rolled by, and what a death it is. Linux is everywhere. I have used it every day since that first post on the minix-list I noticed, the one about funet.fi. I've made a living with it, and I've done amazing things, boring things, mundane things, and normal things. "Netware is Dead, Man! Desqview is Dead, Man! DOS is long gone, man!" Well, alright, MIPS Computing didn't last long, and that pizzabox was well and truly (sadly) de-commissioned. But, with the profits I made in SoCal during the 90's, putting Linux to work from my own little consulting office in One Wilshire, I bought all the SGI toys I could want .. and I still have them. Curious, though, that I mostly use Apples' Unix as a front-end to access them all, heheh ..
TacticalCoder 2y ago
[dead]
chem83 2y ago
From the linked Wikipedia article on Tannenbaum x Torvalds debate: > but 5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5 I find it interesting how academic circles back then were really not betting on the longevity of x86.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  It was not believed UNIX workstations were to be disrupted as they were with Google plans of cheap PC hardware running GNU/Linux on x86. Maybe had BSD not be fighting AT&T, or Microsoft bothered with providing a proper POSIX experience in Windows NT insteaf of making the minimum for goverment contracts, and Linux history would have been much different, including its impact on cheap UNIX servers.
samiv 2y ago
Oh, I thought it's still the early days considering that just the other day the whole system went into a death spiral where everything graphical slowly ground to a halt and then froze completely and I had to pull the power cord. Or considering that building my project in debug (yes, bog standard CMake debug build with GCC) causes a complete kernel hang about half the time and I have to pull the power cord again. Linux (as in the kernel + whatever user space you choose) is about 90% done. Now it just needs the other 90% to be taken care of to move beyond alpha.... "The year of the Linux desktop is always 10 years from now" ;-)
initramfs 2y ago
bookmarked.
relistan 2y ago
I had the minimum machine to run Linux 0.95 on: a 386sx16 with 4mb of memory and a 40mb drive. I actually had only 2mb but I recall Linux installed but barely ran. I upgraded it with SIPPs so I could run Linux properly. It was incredibly fun to have a Unix box on my desk in high school. But actually, I’ve built a 30 year career on that experience. A heartfelt thanks to Linus and all the contributors who have (so far!) supported this project.

463 points by stmw 2y ago

[2023], but that doesn't matter much. Fantastic article! Great to see what development was like at the start - I'd always heard anecdotes, like its humble beginnings and the MINIX argument, but I'd never had context for them before.

stmw 2y ago
My bad, dang just pointed this out as well: Discussed at the time (of the article): The early days of Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35557848 - April 2023 (224 comments) I just came across it and didnt' realize it appeared on Hn almost 2 years before.
- forbiddenlake 2y ago
  It's fine, dupes are allowed after an amount of time.

imiric 2y ago

> More importantly for the future success of Linux was that the X11 system was ported to it, making 1992 the year of the Linux desktop. I'm glad that's finally settled. :) Great read!

LorenDB 2y ago

Also worth a read: Just for Fun https://www.amazon.com/Just-Fun-Story-Accidental-Revolutionary/dp/0066620732 https://www.amazon.com/Just-Fun-Story-Accidental-Revolutiona...

juhanakristian 2y ago
Read this about ten years ago. Pretty short read but highly recommended.

ylee 2y ago

I knew the very basics of the story, but did not know/hadn't put it together in my mind that kernel 1.0 appeared in mid-1994, and not somewhere in the 1991-1993 timeframe as I had vaguely assumed. Certainly, the Red Hat Linux 2.1 (kernel 1.2.13) I installed in December 1995 (making my home 100% Microsoft-free ever since) felt pretty feature-complete.

indigodaddy 2y ago

lwn.net - Such a beautiful website, just kind of perfect on mobile. Anyone know if it's using a commonly known CMS? builtwith doesn't glean much..

jzb 2y ago
It’s a custom CMS built using Quixote.
- linsomniac 2y ago
  Joe Brockmeier. Well there's a name I haven't heard in a very long time. Sean Reifschneider here, if you remember.
  - jzb 2y ago
    I do, though it's been quite a while. Hope all is well with you!

linsomniac 2y ago

One thing I often think about in the early days of Linux is it's competitors. The article mentions "commercial Unix was so expensive it was easier to write your own". Which is largely true. However there is also Coherent Unix. I remember adverts for it as the full back page of so many magazines of the day, for $99. I always was on the fence about buying it. One of the big drawbacks of Coherent was that it didn't have any networking. Then, Linux came out, and it was shockingly shortly after that that Linux surpassed Coherent, and Coherent vanished seemingly overnight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system)

arp242 2y ago
Reading a review from Dec 1990[1], it doesn't seem that brilliant: "Coherent remains true to Unix's roots and eschews local area networking, graphical user interfaces, menus, mice, and many of the other amenities that present-day DOS users and Unix users have come to expect of modern software." It goes on to describe that "learning Unix from Coherent would be a bumpy road" and "nor could you realistically use Coherent to automate a small business". Coherent was closed-source, so you couldn't take an imperfect incomplete system like Linux and help improve it. Linux attracted contributors early on not because Linux at the time was so great, but because people liked to work on this kind of thing. $99 is ~$230 today. I know software used to be a lot more expensive in general (e.g. $25 for PKZIP in the late 80s), but $230 for a bare-bones OS for playing around is only "cheap" relative to Enterprise Unix™® pricing. [1]: https://books.google.ie/books?id=JZxkO0PpksUC&pg=PT61&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.ie/books?id=JZxkO0PpksUC&pg=PT61&redir_...
- ForTheKidz 2y ago
  Did it not have some kind of ncurses functionality? So much of what I see about software from the eighties (mostly via movies) seems operable with just an unnetworked unix terminal.
jmclnx 2y ago
>However there is also Coherent Unix. I was a customer and it was very good, I use to use kermit to dial into a Sun System at work and it would call me back so I would avoid charges. That was to get USENET and general Internet access. Fun times. It is too bad they had to fold, be to be honest by 1995 the writting was on the wall, When they folded, I went to Slackware, which I still use. Back then, Linux was changing almost daily. Coherent had one thing that Linux could not do, but via USENET I asked and someone supplied a patch for me within days. It would allow me to use 2 monitors with 2 cards on my 386sx, a BW and a VGA just like what Coherent was able to do. People were far more accessible back then until the fortune 500 companies got involved in the 2000s.

linwangg 2y ago

It's fascinating that the name 'Linux' was actually chosen by Ari Lemmke, not Linus himself. Details like this highlight the role of community and serendipity in the history of open-source software.

zaikunzhang 2y ago
Quoting Wikipedia [1], which provides a bit more details (as of 2025-03-03): Linus Torvalds had wanted to call his invention Freax, a portmanteau of "free", "freak", and "x" (as an allusion to Unix). During the start of his work on the system, he stored the files under the name "Freax" for about half of a year. Torvalds had already considered the name "Linux", but initially dismissed it as too egotistical. [2] In order to facilitate development, the files were uploaded to the FTP server (ftp.funet.fi) of FUNET in September 1991. Ari Lemmke at Helsinki University of Technology (HUT), who was one of the volunteer administrators for the FTP server at the time, did not think that "Freax" was a good name. Therefore, he named the project "Linux" on the server without consulting Torvalds. [2] Later, however, Torvalds consented to "Linux". To demonstrate how the word "Linux" should be pronounced ([ˈliːnɵks]), Torvalds included an audio guide with the kernel source code. [3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux#Naming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux#Naming [2] Torvalds, Linus; Diamond, David (2001). Just For Fun - The Story Of An Accidental Revolutionary. New York: HarperBusiness. p. 84. ISBN 0-06-662072-4. [3] Torvalds, Linus (March 1994). "Index of /pub/linux/kernel/SillySounds" (https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/SillySounds/ https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/SillySounds/). Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20091008074754/http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/SillySounds/ https://web.archive.org/web/20091008074754/http://www.kernel...) from the original on October 8, 2009. Retrieved August 3, 2009.

dang 2y ago

Discussed at the time (of the article): The early days of Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35557848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35557848 - April 2023 (224 comments)

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

qingcharles 2y ago

TIL: Linus is a Swedish speaking Finn; and those are a thing. This sound has lived rent-free in my head since 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Linus-linux.ogg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Linus-linux.ogg

rottc0dd 2y ago
Wow! I think he got different in his English diction much later in his life?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
stmw 2y ago
Indeed, he is part of the Swedish minority in Finland... I thought everyone (on HN) already knew that?
- qingcharles 2y ago
  Nope! Slipped me by and I'm a language nerd who literally worked for Nokia (only one trip to the mothership though) and spent my teens deep in the Finnish demoscene and the rest of the 90s knee-deep in Linux.
- emmelaich 2y ago
  Many Fins can speak Swedish. Around 10pc? It is an official language. When I met Linus T in 1994/5 I asked why he spoke Swedish and not Finnish and he rolled his eyes. Was so sick of the question even then. https://linuxjournal.rubdos.be/ljarchive/LJ/008/2867.html https://linuxjournal.rubdos.be/ljarchive/LJ/008/2867.html
  - pimeys 2y ago
    Yeah. Speaking swedish especially in the coastal area of Finland is quite common. My father in law mixes both languages together in a funny way in his talk. It's kind of funny, but also pretty common among the Finnish-Swedes...

hnthrowaway0315 2y ago

Such an inspiring read! Thanks for writing and/or sharing. One of my many future hermit projects is to hack on an early version of Linux. ------------ Please ignore just jotting down for future myself --------------- (Actually I want to study Win NT more than Linux as it brought me good memories, but Win NT was designed as a mature product from the beginning, and even the leaked 3.5 source code is way too much for me.) I checked the version history and 0.11 seems to be a good start. Reasons: - There is this book (https://download.oldlinux.org/ECLK-5.0-WithCover.pdf https://download.oldlinux.org/ECLK-5.0-WithCover.pdf) which follows the style of Lion's Unix v6 book and uses the 0.12 kernel as reference; - 0.11 doesn't have a virtual memory or a virtual terminal, and they are among the software I'd like to implement; - 0.11 does have the basic stuffs so I assume it is not too difficult to set it up with QEMU and QEMU-gdb; The list of software to implement in mind: - a Debugger (I'll probably use QEMU-gdb, but if I can write a simple step-in debugger maybe it makes it a bit easier to dogfood? Still too early though as there is no compiler on it) - a Virtual Memory system (following the MIT xv6 lab, maybe a bit more advanced as I will complete the MIT xv6 labs before pursuing this venture); - a Virtual terminal (not sure how much I can implement, maybe just a basic one with limited control sequence support); - a USB driver (not sure if it's possible for 0.11, I have never written a driver before); - a mouse driver (again probably too difficult for me); - a LOT of CLI programs as warm-up. Basically simpler versions of modern ones (less switches); - a text editor. I never liked the key layout of emacs or vim so this is going to be my own thing. I care a lot about moving caret around without using a mouse; - a very basic GUI system. Nothing fancy, just something that can show windows and some widgets. Maybe don't even care about multiple windows. Showing one window with a menu and some buttons probably needs a lot of effort; - a compiler/linker of a simple language (can't dogfood without an editor, a compiler, a linker and a debugger I think) Preparations: - I need to complete all MIT RISC xv6 labs; - I need to figure out how to write drivers for USB and mice; - I want to investigate how X11 and Win32 GUI were implemented and figure out the architecture; - I need to figure out how to write terminals and text editors. There are tons of tutorials online so shouldn't be too tough; - I need to study compiler theory, just continue reading Crafting Interpreters should be good enough; - I need to figure out a comfortable development and debugging environment;

qingcharles 2y ago

klysm 2y ago

It’s a weird feeling to be young enough to never have experienced a world without Linux, but be close enough in time to its creation that many of the people involved are still around. My entire professional career has mostly revolved around it in some capacity. My entire life even since age like 12? It’s pretty crazy to think about the impact it has had on my life

ahazred8ta 2y ago
Note the classic "Linux is a 10 year old boy" ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7ozaFbqg00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7ozaFbqg00
weinzierl 2y ago
I feel similar for Computer Science as a whole field. It's weird to think that many of its founding fathers were still during a significant portion of my life. Claude Shannon 2001 Edsger Dijkstra 2012 John McCarthy 2011 Niklaus Wirth 2024 Konrad Zuse 1995 Alonzo Church 1995 Jim Gray 2007/2012 Grace Hopper 1992 Even Alan Turing could still have been alive during my lifetime hadn't he been murdered. Friedrich L. Baur, who died in 2015, still had an office at my university when I studied there and I often passed by, saw his name plate, and wondered if this was all real. Luckily Donald Knuth is still around.
- neontomo 2y ago
  Alan Turing took his own life on purpose or by accident, he wasn't murdered
  - flohofwoe 2y ago
    If you read up on how the UK government treated him after the war, it was essentially murder even if they didn't outright execute him.
    - bigstrat2003 2y ago
      No, words mean things. If they didn't actually pull the trigger, it wasn't murder. That isn't to say it was ok to treat Turing the way they did, because it wasn't ok. But it's important to not pollute the meaning of words by misusing them for greater rhetorical impact.

baskint 2y ago

early 90s, i286 story reminded me purchasing my i386 SX (4 MBs RAM, perhaps 20 MB HD), running DOS 5, then DOS 6 could not afford the DX edition for some reason. i286s were just phasing out then. amazing how linux started. thanks for sharing!

homebrewer 2y ago

See also, by the same author: https://liw.fi/linux20 https://liw.fi/linux20

zidoo 2y ago

“ We had all the overconfidence of 20-year-old second-year university students.” - and this is how you change the world

timewizard 2y ago
That's how you start. It's also important to recognize that much of the UNIX and eventually POSIX framework was laid out. They were filling in a small gap and making it free. Which is really the most amazing part to me.

qwertox 2y ago

It's odd how Linux has become the only stable thing in this world. You turn it on and you know that over time it will only become better without any bad intentions.

xtracto 2y ago
This is so important to me on this day and age. Most new technology and OS seem to have an agenda. They want to "push" me to do things: buy an iPhone, buy an office subscription , etc. Using Linux is a breath of fresh air in that respect for me. I just want my toaster tu toast bread. I don't want it to tell me what bread should I buy.
- nehal3m 2y ago
  Wouldn't want to toast unauthorized bread.
  - xattt 2y ago
    You wouldn’t steal heat from a toaster.
- jmclnx 2y ago
  >I just want my toaster I think I heard the NetBSD toaster is out of support :(
- alt227 2y ago
  But we ALL want our toasters to ask us if we want any toast
- sgarland 2y ago
  This is why I dislike Ubuntu – I don't like Snaps, and I don't want them to be considered the default.
DoingIsLearning 2y ago
Every well can be poisoned. Linux relies on people's values and people's skills. Neither of which are immune to degradation over time. Much like the post world war civil society, economic and diplomatic development was an exception in Human history. Assuming the reality we have will remain forever without protection or constant maintenance effort is dangerous.

linuxhansl 2y ago

Fun. I started using Linux at 0.98 (forgot the patch level), in 1992. Had a modem and connected to a lot of bulletin boards. I felt very much a like "WarGames" hero, calling phone numbers and all :) I still remember the day when I used ppp to connect to the actual Internet for the first time. After a lot of trial and error, I finally pinged www.linux.org, and it resolved the hostname and returned the ping. I was silent first, and all I could say then was "whoa". Oh fun times. :)

api 2y ago
My first net connection was using slirp via a shell account. Slirp was a CSLIP emulator that ran in user space on the shell box on the remote side. Back in those days multi user shell machines were quite common and some of the first ISPs offered Internet access that way. Mine was an ISP called Internet Access Cincinnati that gave each user shell on a Sun Sparc 10 running SunOS (pre-Solaris). You also got POP e-mail and a -username home folder accessible via web.
- jks 2y ago
  Slirp lives on in QEMU and container engines: https://github.com/rootless-containers/slirp4netns https://github.com/rootless-containers/slirp4netns
- jabl 2y ago
  Ha, Running slirp in the ISP shell box was also how I first got beyond bbs'ed onto the wild west of the internet. Also getting online was one of my first motivations for using Linux, as the Trumpet winsock networking library for Windows 3.1 was terrible and crashed the entire computer all the time.

DeathArrow 2y ago

>More importantly for the future success of Linux was that the X11 system was ported to it, making 1992 the year of the Linux desktop. Yet some people await for a second coming.

ggm 2y ago

Was used to using pdp11/vax based systems moving to Suns and other workstations, and for a number of reasons the initial launch floppies of linux felt "under cooked" compared to the BSD systems also being released for larger Intel chips with MMU. But, the killer side of this was the linux code ran on smaller Intel boxes, probably a little better than Minix did. when 386BSD got it's act together, it became less apparent but very quickly impetus got behind the distro "scene" and Linux took off like a rocket. Those first early days, no real network stack, minimal desktop support, it was line-and-ball. Mainly, I think the BSD lawsuit/licence issues was the negative energy source in BSD occupying the ground. I had an IBM PC/RT at the time running the 4.3bsd port which was just lovely. But such clunky hardware. PCs were coming into their own and IBM didn't want to keep playing in multiple OS and had AIX coming through and the ROMP chip was getting old. Once graphics display cards on PCI emerged along with decent cheap ethernet cards, and then ethernet on the motherboard I think it was game over. (although for obvious reasons most people's experience of network was modem on serial)

openplatypus 2y ago

Slackware 3.6/4.0 back in 1998-99 Never forget. The joy of startx command working (sometimes) Fun times.

keyle 2y ago
I remember when I had to choose whether I was a slackware guy or a debian guy! I chose slackware like many french speaking fellas around. Oh, the times. PS: debian all the way since.
- anta40 2y ago
  Slackware 11 was all I had in PC as univ student circa 2006-2008 (yep, just said goodbye to Win XP). All the tools I need to do assignments were provided in 3 CDs. At that time, fast internet connection was considered a bit expensive. Now I'm happy with Debian.

udev4096 2y ago

There's this amazing documentary on linux, from 2003. It's called Revolution OS. Highly recommended! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0RYQVkQmWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0RYQVkQmWU

rixed 2y ago
I second that. The best documentary I've ever seen about Linux and GNU.

infp_arborist 2y ago

For the biggest part of my life it seemed that all these technical accomplishments were the work of untouchable geniuses, but reading this story is also very telling about the value of long-term friendship and financial/societal stability to support each other's explorations.

jxjnskkzxxhx 2y ago
Bad example. Linus is a genius.

pjmlp 2y ago

> The term "open source" was coined and IBM invested a ton of money in Linux development. A relevant key point regarding why Linux actually took off, versus other UNIX clones. And how that eventually came around with Red-Hat's acquision and its influence on GCC, GNOME, Wayland, RPM,... contributions.

susam 2y ago

> The first Linux distribution was also started in 1992: Softlanding Linux System or SLS. The next year, SLS morphed into Slackware, which inspired Ian Murdock to start Debian in 1993, in order to explore a more community-based development structure. A few other distributions would follow in the years to come. And follow they did! The Great Linux Distribution Timeline at <https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Di...> presents an impressive graph of the countless distributions that descended from Slackware, Debian, etc. This graph is still actively maintained by the community here: <https://github.com/FabioLolix/LinuxTimeline https://github.com/FabioLolix/LinuxTimeline>.

jasoneckert 2y ago

I remember the early days of Linux well. There was quite a bit of interest for it at the University of Waterloo in the mid 90s, but there was also a lot of talk of issues getting it to install, or getting it to run stably on certain systems (albeit not uncommon for any OS at the time). Those were the days of having to know how to compile your own kernel and fight with XFree86. Linux distributions like Red Hat really squashed those concerns within a short time and made things much easier on all fronts. Their documentation was also excellent. By the late 1990s, Red Hat was as common as Solaris, AIX, and IRIX at the university, but most still considered it inferior to Solaris. And now, RHEL is the main *nix system used there (a few use Debian).

ttyprintk 2y ago
I think this is consistent with big universities at the time. I remember when Alpha was becoming discontinued, reinstalling RedHat on those did give Linux a boost as a daily driver for researchers.
- jasoneckert 2y ago
  Linux definitely breathed life into that great platform. I still have an Alpha Personal Workstation 600au in my basement running Red Hat from that time period.
  - cbm-vic-20 2y ago
    I had a Jensen (DECpc AXP 150) and an Alpha Multia; there were the first targets for Windows NT 3.51 on Alpha, but I had early Alpha Linux running on them. These might still be buried in the basement of my parents' house. Not as cool as the OSF/1-based DECserver 2100 "Sable" at work. I loved that machine.
ajross 2y ago
> Those were the days of having to know how to compile your own kernel and fight with XFree86. It was the XF86Config modeline HOWTO that taught me how a CRT controller works.
2y ago

sgarland 2y ago

Great read. My first Linux distro was, I think, Slackware, around kernel version 2.2 - 2.4. I played with a _lot_ of distros; I think Sorcerer was the most esoteric. I settled on Gentoo, as one does, and spent more time compiling / breaking / fixing than I did using anything. I eventually valued stability over bleeding-edge, and have happily been using Debian ever since.

looofooo0 2y ago

They confusing Linux and GNU/Linux in that article.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago
They're not bothering to draw a distinction that almost nobody cares about, yes.
- looofooo0 2y ago
  One should make one as it otherwise makes it hard to read, because there is no distinction between the operating system and the kernel. Saying Linux can compile itself is just nonsense as it clearly needs GNU GCC or another compiler. But of course you can have a Linux operating system without a compiler. Using Linux as either Linux the Kernel or a operating system with the Linux kernel interchangably is just imprecise gibberish. Almost as bad as intellectual property.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

tonnydourado 2y ago

> My name is Lars Wirzenius, and I was there when Linux started. "I was there, Gandalf. I was there 3000 years ago" XD

segmondy 2y ago

It's amazing how good and stable it got really fast. I was able to install it and use it with X and for everything in 1994 while still in high school. It's been my only OS ever since and set the path for my career and life.

9front 2y ago

We will always have Linux, the kernel, but the desktop experience is being sabotaged by Microsoft with WSL.

markus_zhang 2y ago
I have been using Ubuntu as my main drive for a couple of weeks and I have to admit it's still clearly not ready for the masses.
linguae 2y ago
I disagree with the notion that Microsoft is sabotaging the Linux desktop via WSL. In my opinion, I believe it’s the Sisyphean development churn of the FOSS desktop ecosystem that held the Linux desktop back. However, the industry-wide move away from native apps toward Web apps, combined with growing dissatisfaction with Windows in some circles and with the high cost of switching to a Mac (especially for those who need more RAM than what Apple sells by default), has provided a large lifeline for the Linux desktop. The Linux desktop has had a rough history. The original problem was the original KDE using a non-FOSS Qt, which led to the development of GNOME, splintering the FOSS desktop ecosystem into two competing desktops, spreading already-thin resources. Granted, things were good in the mid-2000s, when GNOME 2 and KDE 3 were current, and when it appeared that the Linux desktop would be poised to make significant inroads against Windows XP, just like how Firefox in 2005 formed a formidable challenge to Internet Explorer. Even OpenOffice appeared to seriously challenge Microsoft Office at the time. In my opinion, there have been many setbacks since the late 2000s. GNOME 3’s very controversial changes led to the splintering of the GNOME/Gtk community (Cinnamon and MATE). KDE 4 was not well received, though KDE 5 is widely praised. GNOME and other projects (though not KDE) was heavily influenced by mobile computing paradigms led by a misguided belief that desktops will become obsolete. The transition from X11 to Wayland has been quite rocky, to say the least. Interestingly enough, what has improved the competitiveness of the Linux desktop these days has been the shift away from native apps and toward both the Web and Electron apps. While as a long-time former Mac user I lament the decline of native apps and the loss of consistency, apps built on Web technologies are cross-platform or even platform-agnostic. If one doesn’t need native Windows and macOS apps, then the barrier to switching to a Linux desktop is much lower. Even the gaming situation has dramatically improved on Linux.

helpfulContrib 2y ago

I was 22 years old, hacking away in Progress 4GL, maintaining data centers across the country using a combination of Quarterdesk DesqView and "Remote Control", which gave a way to control a keyboard/mouse/monitor over a modem connection. Every field office had 2 or 3 PC's dedicated to the task of providing a "remote terminal" to our development team, so that we could dial in remotely and do administrative things to the Progress 4GL database server that was running on another dedicated system for the task, usually a fat Novell Netware server with 4 or 8 "huge" disks of 640Megabytes dedicated to the databases. It was my job to monitor the rows and rows of PC's on our side of things, that were used for remote admin. Honestly, I despised this job. I'd spent most of the 80's learning C and Unix programming - my first Unix machine was a MIPS Computing Magnum pizzabox running risc/OS. $15,000 worth of machine, sitting on my desk - but yet I still had to walk down the corridor and hack around on cheap DOS PC's just to get things fixed across the country in some hellish New Hampshire closet. At least it paid me well. Well enough that I could go to the regular PC Computer swap meets out in Pasadena every weekend or so, and buy myself the parts needed to build a "decent computer for home" - a 486 with 8Megabytes of RAM, a few hundred megabytes of disk space. A CD-ROM drive, maybe a high-end video card and monitor capable of 1025x768 and 256 colours. A modem, so I could work from home, run my own DesqView instance, have my own multiple-terminal connections to all those troublesome field offices. I'd also make regular (weekly) jaunts to The Opamp Bookstore, in Hollywood - one of my favourite places in all the world. It was there I'd wandered into the "Unix" section and seen some magazines and books on the MINIX operating system, and it was there that I learned about the rise of Usenet as a place to get to meet other hackers, C programmers, Unix nerds. It was also where I'd get my 2600 Magazine fix, monthly. One day, I got my home PC finally built, booted, and running. I connected to my mailserver, wnsnews.com .. checked my mail. A fellow operator had sent me a message "Check out the minix-list, they're talking about a new unix-like kernel you might be interested in..." So I subscribe, and lo and behold, there it was - the link to ftp.funet.fi, Linux in its very early stages. It took me about a day to download it, about a week to figure out all the various floppy disks I'd have to make to get the drivers for everything set up, and a whole weekend of faffing around to get things installed alongside my Desqview setup, on a brand new hard drive. I was hooked. It didn't have everything - X11 wasn't ported yet - but it had just enough for me to port some of my own C code, see that things could actually work like my MIPS pizzabox, albeit on my cheaper 486, and .. maybe .. someday .. someone would port "Remote Control" or even the Desqview terminals, to this brand new 'Linux' thing. Some months later, in the middle of being shut down entirely by my fellow grey-beard programmers, who wanted me to stop fiddling about with all the spare parts in our "Remote Control" room, I learned about this brand new Linux 'distribution', Yggdrasil. A trip to OpAmp book shop, and there it was: the bootable floppy and the full Linux filesystem, included on CD, to turn any of our machines into a working Linux system - with X11 onboard! And, probably working, if I chose our SVGA card settings right! What a revelation! I could use my home 486 as a decent terminal for my pizzabox! I could use telnet to get into the Novell servers across the other side of the country! I could endlessly annoy my grey-beard associates with the idea that "Linux is the Future, man!", over and over again, until they finally lock me out of the Novell server and decide I was only good for Unix things, as punishment, because as they knew full well "Unix is Dead, man!" Well, the decades have rolled by, and what a death it is. Linux is everywhere. I have used it every day since that first post on the minix-list I noticed, the one about funet.fi. I've made a living with it, and I've done amazing things, boring things, mundane things, and normal things. "Netware is Dead, Man! Desqview is Dead, Man! DOS is long gone, man!" Well, alright, MIPS Computing didn't last long, and that pizzabox was well and truly (sadly) de-commissioned. But, with the profits I made in SoCal during the 90's, putting Linux to work from my own little consulting office in One Wilshire, I bought all the SGI toys I could want .. and I still have them. Curious, though, that I mostly use Apples' Unix as a front-end to access them all, heheh ..

TacticalCoder 2y ago

[dead]

chem83 2y ago

From the linked Wikipedia article on Tannenbaum x Torvalds debate: > but 5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5 I find it interesting how academic circles back then were really not betting on the longevity of x86.

pjmlp 2y ago
It was not believed UNIX workstations were to be disrupted as they were with Google plans of cheap PC hardware running GNU/Linux on x86. Maybe had BSD not be fighting AT&T, or Microsoft bothered with providing a proper POSIX experience in Windows NT insteaf of making the minimum for goverment contracts, and Linux history would have been much different, including its impact on cheap UNIX servers.

samiv 2y ago

Oh, I thought it's still the early days considering that just the other day the whole system went into a death spiral where everything graphical slowly ground to a halt and then froze completely and I had to pull the power cord. Or considering that building my project in debug (yes, bog standard CMake debug build with GCC) causes a complete kernel hang about half the time and I have to pull the power cord again. Linux (as in the kernel + whatever user space you choose) is about 90% done. Now it just needs the other 90% to be taken care of to move beyond alpha.... "The year of the Linux desktop is always 10 years from now" ;-)

initramfs 2y ago

bookmarked.

relistan 2y ago

I had the minimum machine to run Linux 0.95 on: a 386sx16 with 4mb of memory and a 40mb drive. I actually had only 2mb but I recall Linux installed but barely ran. I upgraded it with SIPPs so I could run Linux properly. It was incredibly fun to have a Unix box on my desk in high school. But actually, I’ve built a 30 year career on that experience. A heartfelt thanks to Linus and all the contributors who have (so far!) supported this project.