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Owen Le Blanc: creator of the first Linux distribution
- stuaxo 1y agoThe comments section on the article is nice, lots of people's memory's of MCC Interim Linux and Owen.
- noufalibrahim 1y agoWhat a glorious piece of history. I wonder what other "scratching my itch" solutions became so mainstream that people forgot about the original authors.
- Foxboron 1y agoI think all of todays popular Linux distros, Debian, Gentoo, Fedora, Arch, SUSE and so on, are all very much "scratching my itch" projects that somehow managed to outlive the original authors engagement with the project. It's not like any of them where planning to be used by millions of people.
- kryptiskt 1y agoFedora wasn't like that, it was spun out of Red Hat when they went enterprise only with RHEL.
- lproven 1y agoYes and no. I realise that to younger members of the Linux community they're all from long ago, but they're not the same age. There aren't really clear generations in Linux distros, but as an approximation: Debian is pretty old, but it's a 2nd gen distro, borne from dissatisfaction with the very early SLS. So was Slackware, but it took SLS and improved it. Slackware is arguably the oldest surviving distro. SuSE has roots as a German version of Slackware. Red Hat's package manager was bolted on later. Gentoo and Arch are relatively modern, being 21st century projects. Arguably, they're 3rd gen. Fedora is a 4th gen distro, younger than any of the others here. Its ancestor was Red Hat Linux, which was contemporaneous with Debian -- but was left behind by Debian's technical encancements: in 1996 or so, Debian introduced `apt`, a package manager with automatic recursive dependency resolution. This put it far in the lead of Red Hat, which still only had RPM and no dependency resolution. Red Hat went in another direction. Red Hat Linux 7 became RHEL, a commercial, paid-for, supported distro. The free RHL went on for 2 more versions, reaching Red Hat Linux 9, which then became Fedora Core, version 1 of the free unsupported community distro. RHL was killed off after v9.
- ghaff 1y agoAs I understood the story as an analyst at the time, Red Hat’s intention was to just kill RHL after a decent interval but there was sufficient outcry that they came out with Fedora. But I’m sure there are many different recollections and variants of the Fedora was planned all along story told over the years that the “truth” is probably pretty elusive at this point.
- Foxboron 1y ago> Debian is pretty old, but it's a 2nd gen distro, borne from dissatisfaction with the very early SLS. Scratches their own itch, check. > So was Slackware, but it took SLS and improved it. Slackware is arguably the oldest surviving distro. Itch scratching, check. >SuSE has roots as a German version of Slackware. Red Hat's package manager was bolted on later. Pretty sure this was itch scratching as well. > Gentoo and Arch are relatively modern, being 21st century projects. Arguably, they're 3rd gen. Both are itch scratching projects! > Fedora is a 4th gen distro, younger than any of the others here. Its ancestor was Red Hat Linux, which was contemporaneous with Debian -- but was left behind by Debian's technical encancements: in 1996 or so, Debian introduced `apt`, a package manager with automatic recursive dependency resolution. This put it far in the lead of Red Hat, which still only had RPM and no dependency resolution. Arch and Gentoo are from 2002, and Fedora from 2003. Fedora was based on someone starting to package FOSS software for RHEL, more itch scratching!
- qiine 1y agowhat about nixOS ? third gen as well ?
- fsiefken 1y agoSome more context from a former colleague: https://techrights.org/n/2025/05/02/Manchester_Computing_Centre_MCC_Made_the_First_GNU_Linux_Distro.shtml https://techrights.org/n/2025/05/02/Manchester_Computing_Cen... MCC Interim Linux wikipedia page notes it started out with Linux kernel 0.12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCC_Interim_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCC_Interim_Linux https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-versions/RELNOTES-0.12 https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-version... It makes me want to play, configure, compile, tidy and optimize! https://github.com/ESP32DE/Boot-Linux-ESP32S3-Playground https://github.com/ESP32DE/Boot-Linux-ESP32S3-Playground
- nikdoof 1y agoOwen used to organise the Manchester Linux User Group at the MCC as well, I fondly remember those early days when I was learning Linux. Looking back it was an amazing privilege to connect with some extremely knowledgeable people in the Linux ecosystem.
- trebligdivad 1y agoYeh a few ManLUGers still get together for a Jitsi call about once a month; not many these days.
- mprstn 1y agoI still remember Owen showing me Linux (I was a Ph.D. student in the graphics lab at MCC, so this was probably around 92-93). He's such a nice guy. I had no idea he had such a claim to fame....though I suspect he didn't either!
- TomMasz 1y agoThis really brings back memories of how painful installing any software in the early 90s was. The small company I worked for got us a Yggdrasil CD to try but we were unable to get it installed on any of the PCs we had at the time. MCC might have done better, but we hadn't heard of it.
- TacticalCoder 1y agoWas Yggdrasil that bad? My first distro was Slackware and, with the help of the book accompanying the CD, it was doable. Sure you had to define modelines for X11 (the Xorg name didn't exist bad then) to support your monitor and supporting GPUs was quite the endeavour, but in the end we'd make it work. We'd even compile and run Emacs (in 45 minutes or so).
- greenavocado 1y agoIt was called XFree86
- bluedino 1y agoI don't remember what the first Linux distribution I used was, but it a set of floppy disks I downloaded from a local BBS. I somehow got it to boot up but didn't really know what to do with it after that.
- bityard 1y agoCould very well have been Slackware. Slackware was my first Linux distribution, it came as a set of like at least 20 floppies. All of mine were repurposed AOL disks. After spending about a solid week or so downloading the whole set of disk images over a slow and intermittent dialup connection, the next most painful thing was the fact that floppies were notoriously unreliable. Some disks would throw I/O errors when writing. Some would get caught immediately after when verifying. Many others showed no problems until install time. Getting two dozen floppies to actually read 100% of their contents successfully took a week or two on its own because I only had one computer to work with.
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- lproven 1y agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43782975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43782975 (no comments)
- dnisbet 1y agoOoh great to see this pop up on the HN front page - I have great memories of working with Owen at UoM :)
- kpw94 1y agoSo first linux distribution was this one Feb 1992. And first linux distribution with a GUI was "TAMU linux", 3 months later: https://lwn.net/Articles/91371/ https://lwn.net/Articles/91371/ Both were released by universities
- dehrmann 1y agoHas the distribution model been good for Linux? It led to different approaches to things like desktop environments, packaging, and a variety of platforms, but 30+ years later, there are several sane choices for server distros, desktop distros are even more fragmented, and the most popular user distros are Android and ChromeOS.
- EGG_CREAM 1y agoI think so, because the users seem to like having different options. For commercial software, it makes sense to count how many devices use a particular distribution as the measure of “success”, but for projects like most Linux distributions , I don’t know that number of users makes sense. Why should we care how many users a particular distribution has, when almost all of them aren’t paying or contributing? Having more users doesn’t make the software any better inherently, and nobody is making money from those users. Instead, I would argue that user enthusiasm and dev interest are better measures of success for open source projects like this, and arch, Debian, Linux mint, etc are all doing fine in those regards.
- michaelmrose 1y agoIt is tempting to consider the replacement for a lively evolving market of good options is just the best option only better for all the labor focused on a singular end but in fact the likely result of a singular option is most of that labor that literally only exists because of the interest in doing ones own thing just ceases to exists and is lost. What persists never had the privilege of benefiting from ideas taken from all those other now non-existent projects and is on the whole mediocre.
- kmacleod 1y agoThe packaging model of distribution is ubiquitous. Every distribution does the same thing just using different control files and tools. The differentiation between distributions is all in their packaging policies and platform decisions. In a loose way Unix (SysV, HP, AIX) started packaging before Linux but Linux said "Every project is its own package" and ran with it. The de-facto "Download release; apply patches; configure; make; make install; collect files" is present in every distribution package. Everything up through deployment is the same pattern across all distributions.
- spacedcowboy 1y agoFWIW, I think I was the first person to ever produce a unix-like distribution for the Atari ST/TT line in 1992. It installed MiNT (MiNT is Not Tos) on a free partition, with a minix filesystem and various optional disks (including make, ash, gcc, etc.) The install-help docs were written using Calligrapher, an application I still think was way ahead of its time on the ST. There are postscript docs as well as ASCII ones at the link below. [1] https://websites.umich.edu/~archive/atari/Mint/Distrib_kit/Doc/ https://websites.umich.edu/~archive/atari/Mint/Distrib_kit/D...