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> See Linux that gave access to an Unix-like OS at a time were it was unreachable to hobbyist. This is revisionist history. Linux eventually supplanted FreeBSD
by jandrewrogers 2y ago
> See Linux that gave access to an Unix-like OS at a time were it was unreachable to hobbyist.
This is revisionist history. Linux eventually supplanted FreeBSD, which was widely used and popular in the 1990s. FreeBSD was also objectively the better OS back then, a clean and reliable system.
What made Linux successful over the long-term IMO is that they evolved the kernel much faster and earlier than FreeBSD, particularly when it came to hardware scalability and performance, which was advantageous with the progression of Moore’s Law. The cluster-style supercomputers were developed almost entirely on Linux as a result, which created a positive feedback cycle. Second, the Linux user-land quickly became really pleasant to use compared to most other UNIX flavors at the time because they weren’t too concerned with purity or being strictly interoperable with some other UNIX.
Most people in the industry today don’t remember the era of at least a dozen different UNIX-style OS being widely used. I probably used half of them in anger at some point. In that environment Linux won by having a superior UX out of the box for a lot of use cases, even if you paid the absurd money for one of the proprietary UNIX flavors. Later Linux started demonstrating better performance too. FreeBSD was definitely tidier and cleaner with its much slower evolution but sometimes worse is better.
- amszmidt 2y ago> This is revisionist history. […] FreeBSD came quite a bit later than GNU and Linux. The BSDs were also plagued by the whole AT&T mess. As someone who was around at the time… I cannot really relate to your comment.
- jandrewrogers 2y agoWhile Linux was technically released a year or two earlier, the contemporaneous versions of FreeBSD were much more mature. Linux was pretty unusable as a production server for the first several years but FreeBSD was more than serviceable. I used them both almost from the beginning of their existence. Linux was a novelty early on but FreeBSD was serving a lot of the load in Silicon Valley for a big chunk of the 1990s. Linux didn’t really hit its stride until the 2000s. Linux was pretty actively bad early on if you just needed a UNIX server.
- amszmidt 2y agoWe will have to disagree, by 1993 we (University) used it all over the place for production with either Slackware or Debian. Which where rock solid. FreeBSD barely worked around the time, and even with the FreeBSD 2.0 release which nuked a bunch of things due to the whole AT&T mess, people eschewed it like the plauge. That GNU/Linux hit its stride "in the 2000s" is ... what is revisionism of history here to the point of it being an absurd thing to say.