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VA Linux: The biggest dotcom IPO
- 0xbadcafebee 11mo ago> Today, it’s a little unusual for something you buy not to work with Linux Err... no, it's definitely not unusual. I specifically spent a month looking for a laptop with Linux support just so I didn't have to go through the hell of unsupported hardware, and it's still not fully supported.
- gkhartman 11mo agoIf you don't mind me asking, what did you end up buying, and what was lacking support? I'd expect full support from one of the "Linux first" suppliers like System76.
- pcdoyle 11mo agoI just got a ThinkPad E14 Gen 6 and the only thing I had to fix/install manually was the driver for the fingerprint reader (fprintd). Everything else just worked, including my docking station and ultra wide monitor.
- ghaff 11mo agoIt helps to look for things that have some level of official backing. Dell has some models for Ubuntu and Red Hat uses various ThinkPads for employee Linux laptops. (Lot more Macs as well when I left but still plenty of ThinkPads that are overwhelmingly Linux.)
- cabirum 11mo agoMIPI camera on my 3 year old Thinkpad still does not work
- whatever1 11mo agoNot even high resolution screens work properly yet. Wayland has done some progress, but still half of my applications look like sh when I use fractional scaling. Linux is great if all you need is a terminal. Once you need a peripheral, then good luck, literally.
- ghqqwwee 11mo agoThere’s no OS that doesn’t have problems with wireless headsets in Teams. Bluetooth and sound stacks is a badly/barely working combination everywhere. Hibernation is usually the test that fails the sound stacks everywhere.
- dahcryn 11mo agoliterally 0 issues on my macbook It has different issues, but wireless headsets nor hibernation are among them
- ThePowerOfFuet 11mo ago>Wayland has done some progress, but still half of my applications look like sh when I use fractional scaling. Do they look like shell, or like shit? You can use grownup words here.
- ErroneousBosh 11mo ago> Linux is great if all you need is a terminal. Once you need a peripheral, then good luck, literally. Just wait until you try this new Windows thing. Zero hardware support for anything.
- roryrjb 11mo agoIf I install Ubuntu 25.10, I can't get camera effects (blurred background and so on) to work in Meet because hardware compositing (or something, I'm not entirely clear on the details[0][1]) doesn't work properly on the open Nvidia driver on Wayland. Wait I thought this was all supposed to be the future? 0. https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/644 https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/644 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1due6ni/hardware_acceleration_in_electron_apps_on_nvidia/ https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1due6ni/hardware...
- p_l 11mo agoIt's a recurring bug in chrome
- notadev 11mo agoBeen running Fedora on Dell XPS 13 for a couple years with zero problems.
- zpr515 11mo agoSame. And then I upgraded to the new Dell 14 Pro Premium, where webcam does not work (as for any IPU7 laptop for that matter). The rest is fine though, but still annoying.
- graemep 11mo agoWhy did you just not buy a laptop from a supplier that preinstalled Linux?
- 0xbadcafebee 11mo agoI did. Still issues.
- Mountain_Skies 11mo agoLots of things work out of the box, but yes, it's still far from being the default. Kensington is releasing an update to its Expert Mouse trackball. The MSRP looks to be USD$150, so not an inexpensive accessory. It supports Windows and Mac but has no Linux support. No doubt in time there will be community supported projects to give it functionality on Linux close to, but not entirely like, what it has on the other two OSes.
- billy99k 11mo agoI now just use Linux in the WSL. I get Linux with a superior GUI.
- mikestorrent 11mo agoAhh, I'd totally forgotten they evolved into Sourceforge. A pity that they didn't pivot to Git hosting more quickly or they would have had a pretty good path to serious ROI for the enterprise.
- zeruch 11mo agoThey didn't evolve into SF; SF was a project inside of VA that eventually became the flagship of what remained after the hardware and related services were excised. When they started (1998/99), Git wasn't a viable option (the first version of it wasn't released until 2005, by which point SF had ballooned to an enormous scale at the time, with it's own product inertia, and it would be a few more years before Git would become a major VCS itself, which is when Github started, and by then VA/SF was in decline and had changed hands several times. (disclosure: I was on the "Ignition team" for SF)
- qdotme 11mo agoTIL: Backstory of sourceforge! Brings back memories…
- dizhn 11mo agoIf I remember correctly they also provided free hosting to people. It was one of the only places where you could run a PHP site for free.
- zeruch 10mo agoThey did. I actually worked on a few of those projects (e.g. Stampede Linux) One of these days I should blog about how we ended up hosting Python for years...
- ErroneousBosh 11mo ago> it would be a few more years before Git would become a major VCS itself People forget that in the olden days we used Subversion and Bazaar (well, the latter if you were Canonical-adjacent), and before that CVS. And before that, SCCS. Going back decades, it's all people going "this sucks, I'm writing my own VCS", and for whatever reason Git was the one that gained traction in that particularly sticky and slippery swamp.
- wmf 11mo agoA fun tangent to this is ESR's "Surprised By Wealth" where he accidentally became paper rich off VA Linux stock but never made any real money due to the crash. https://lwn.net/1999/1216/a/esr-rich.html https://lwn.net/1999/1216/a/esr-rich.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37708492 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37708492
- cheema33 11mo agoI am not going to shed a tear for ESR. He turned out to be a massive turd.
- wmf 11mo agoESR was always somewhat controversial. People trolled him at the time for what they saw as faux humility and virtue signaling.
- mongol 11mo agoI recall this. But I didn't know he nevet made real money
- justin66 11mo agoTo make money he would have needed to sell his shares, and they became worthless before the post-IPO lockup period ended.
- compsciphd 11mo agothey shouldn't have been. From wikipedia The company raised $132 million, offering shares at $30/share, but the shares opened for trading at $299/share, before closing at $239.25/share, or 698% above the IPO price, breaking a record for the largest first day gain.[7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] Larry Augustin, the 38-year old founder and chief executive officer of the company, became a billionaire on paper and a 26-year old web developer at the company said she was worth $10 million on paper.[2] By August 2000, the shares were trading at $40 each[2] and only 24 mutual funds held the stock.[15] On December 8, 2000, one year later, after the bursting of the dot com bubble, shares traded at $8.49/share.[16] per his essay he was given 150K shares. Even at the IPO price of $30 a share, that's 4.5 million. Do we not think the investment bank handling his shares would have been willing to take his whole stake at $30 a share? But even if they wouldn't more than 6 months later it was still north of $40 a share (so $6mil or so) and even a year or so after the IPO, after the bubble popped, it was still north of $8 a share (so $1+mil).
- Taniwha 11mo agoIt's worth noting that before the dotcom bubble the rule of thumb was that a startup had to have 5 quarters of profit before going public - the whole dot-com thing of going public on vibes before making any profit was part of why it was a bubble, and also why investors were playing in a whole new sandpit and possibly out of their depth
- vlovich123 11mo agoI’m not aware of any company that’s going public only after 5 quarters of profit for the past two and a half decades since the dotcom either.
- twoodfin 11mo agoEspecially strange and relevant here: VA Linux owned Slashdot. Depending on whether you were a Digg person—I was not—Slashdot is either hn’s conceptual grandfather or great-grandfather. “News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters.”
- cowsandmilk 11mo agoWhat do you view as the generations between Slashdot/Digg and HN?
- heelix 11mo agoLikely reddit Many folks left Dig for their primary feed when they did the UI update. I think I switched over to Slashdot around that time. The multi selector for karma, on the comments and them changing usernames so my original no longer worked drove me to reddit as that prime feed for me, for about 10 or so years. As reddit exploded... that main home switched to here. Not quite that same sense of community and always a grab bag of subject, so much closer to Digg/Slashdot feel. I never ended up doing facebook or some of the other social media sites. As reddit tried/tried to become that sort of space (with monetization!) it became something I was not looking for.
- zeruch 10mo agoReddit was contemporary to Digg, it just survived 'better'
- lizardking 11mo agoReddit
- cons0le 11mo agoThis article provides NO explanation of what the "VA" in va linux is for. I guess I'm just stupid and everybody else knew right away
- guenthert 11mo agoWell, it does list the names of the founders ...
- deater 11mo agoway back in the day our college LUG (linux user group) had a rep from VA Linux come to speak, but the person running things was unfamiliar with the company and kept calling them "Virginia Linux"
- Lammy 11mo ago> what the "VA" in va linux is for If you want to keep Up you'll have to stay Down
- zeruch 10mo agoVera-Augustin, the two founders.
- roryirvine 11mo agoThe article mostly talks about VA's workstations, but I got the impression that their server line was just as important. As I recall, they were one of the earliest vendors to produce a 1u server, which was a big potential selling point for them (Cobalt's RaQ was first, but initially used a MIPS R5000 variant with a crippled cache so gained a reputation for being a bit "weird"). Unfortunately, the bursting of the telecoms/networking bubble shortly after their IPO (and a year before the dotcom bubble imploded) flooded the market with 4u servers at fire-sale prices. Rack density wasn't nearly so important back then, so VA's neater kit suddenly appeared a whole lot less competitive.
- styanax 11mo agoWe had 2U VA Linux servers at a company (circa 2000), they were rock solid beasts which continued to run for years. I vaguely remember cannibalizing one chassis to beef up another / replace parts, but as you mentioned by then it was circa 2003 (?) and one could buy palettes of dotcom-bust servers off a dock in SF. A fully kitted HP DL380-G2 was around $100 IIRC, bought one it ran forever too - old Sun and SGI hardware as well, all of it. Dirt cheap, if you still had a job. :-/
- zeruch 10mo ago"but I got the impression that their server line was just as important." They were far more important for the business.