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Linux 3.11 Officially Named "Linux For Workgroups"
An anonymous reader writes "Linus Torvalds decided to change the code name for Linux 3.11 and even submitted an alternate Tux Logo. Heise reports: 'For this release, Linus Torvalds changed the code name from "Unicycling Gorilla" to "Linux for Workgroups" and modified the logo that some systems display when booting: it now depicts a Tux holding a flag with a symbol that is reminiscent of the logo of Windows for Workgroups 3.11, which was released in 1993.'"
As of Windows 7, Microsoft no longer uses the "flag" as a mark to identify Windows. But what claim would Microsoft still have against the use of the flag?
I can't wait to see Linux 95. The Linux market will explode when that comes out.
Good to see Linus still has a sense of humor.
I suppose shipping intentionally buggy IPX drivers with it might be taking the joke too far though.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
When I read the headline, I checked my calendar to make sure today wasn't April 1st........
Because it's funny?
And it really is. People have been cracking jokes for ages and it's nice to see it official. I like it when real projects are run by real people complete with sense of humour.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
From the h-online article: "Zswap, a component that tries to compress and store in RAM memory areas that would otherwise need to be swapped, has now left the staging branch." It surprises me that it took this long to implement swapping to a compressed RAM disk. Or were they waiting for patents related to Connectix RAM Doubler to expire?
Linux is catching up with windows. 20 more years to go! yay!
without reading TFA.
get off my lawn. ha
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The term "Jumped The Shark" has jumped the shark as well.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
Why ? Because Linus has a sense of humor. Remember it was Microsoft that gave Linus a lot of grief in years past. This is just Linus having a little fun at Microsoft's expense. Also, Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was the first truly good consumer level version of Windows.
its not windows envy it a joke. loosen up man
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
There are some uncomfortable comparisons here -
Much like Windows 3.11 the GUI in GUN/Linux isn't a core part of the OS - but a graphics server with window managers on top and all the real work being done by the OS under the manager.
On that note - has anyone ported Progman.exe to X? Would running Wine as the Window manager and Progman as the program count?
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Is that the NRA distribution?
Also, you just KNOW everyone was going to be calling it that anyway, so no point in not getting in on the fun.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
I hope the experience will be better than MS Windows for Workgroups.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
It is funny, and I know funny. I'm a clownfish.
For people unfamiliar with Linux, but familiar with Windows, this is exactly what they take out of this:
No, that's ridiculous. To most people outside the tech world Windows 3.11 for Workgroups is at most a very distant memory and probably something utterly unknown.
This is definitely a symptom of the Linux mindset: they don't care (or don't understand) that they need to keep it simple and explicit if they want to get out of the niche and reach the larger crowd of potential customers.
Keep what simple? It's a kernel. The only people who care about the kernel are distro maintainers, system administrators and hackers. Anyone else will at most see "Ununtu Various Vertibrates" or even less, "Android".
It's the reason development doesn't talk directly to customers
No one is a customer of the kernel development team.
And finally, I do not want to live in a world or community so ruled by corporate blandness that anything vaguely amusing is excised from life entirely. Thankfully the F/OSS community hasn't suffered from that.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
No sorry, we don't wish to appease humorless morons.
If you used the Windows calculator[*], then the result of the calculation 3.11 - 3.1 would give zero, exactly. MS initially claimed it was just a display bug, but backed down later, and even fixed it after 10 years or so (Win 95). Even if you multiplied it by 1000 it still remained zero. With linux, the difference 3.11 - 3.1 is likely a tad larger.
[*] All Windows versions from Win 386 to WfWg 3.11, and possibly earlier but I did not check with Windows 1 or Windows 286. It even did this in WinOS2 (OS/2 versions 2.x, 3, and 4) and was touted as proof that WinOS2 used the same source code as Windows; it even had the same bugs.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
That is true, but the similarity doesn't go much further than that. If you look at the capabilities of the OS underneath, there is a major difference between Linux and DOS. (Even to this day some of the limitations inherited from DOS are still found in modern Windows versions. The last Windows user I came across wasn't able to open a command line window more than 80 characters wide.)
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
It's actually Eric Raymond's own distro: http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/gun-linux
c++;
btw. Why was that a Troll ?
Why uncomfortable? Keeping the GUI out of the kernel is the right thing to do. It's one of the reasons Linux has a better reputation for security and stability than Windows.
Windows 7 uses the Windows XP flag, not the different flag used for Windows 3.1 through Windows 2000. The XP flag has two curves in it and no dots; the Windows 3.1 flag has one curve in the flag and one curve in the dots.
Godwin's law anyone?
Considering it's open source, it's not terribly difficult to verify the veracity of the article.
https://www.kernel.org/diff/diffview.cgi?file=%2Fpub%2Flinux%2Fkernel%2Fv3.x%2Ftesting%2Fpatch-3.11-rc1.xz;z=367
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
Anyone have a spare Disk 8? Mine is corrupted.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
No, it didn't. Well, maybe by Linux fans.
It got panned for not running Windows software, and Linux netbooks had something like a 25% return rate, when their Windows counterparts were much lower.
Because it's funny?
And it really is. People have been cracking jokes for ages and it's nice to see it official. I like it when real projects are run by real people complete with sense of humour.
Actually, I get concerned when projects/products come from people without humor. Because my experience is that the more "serious" they are, the lower the quality of what they deliver.
Even stodgy old IBM's best products seemed to come accompanied by technical docs written with geek quotes in them.
oh my god... I didn't even click onto the 3.11 thing.... of course!
But, all those rating my original post as a troll.. wtf, I was really asking why, I had a proper woosh moment. And even then, how the hell could the words "What? Why?" be construed as trolling.
While not strictly a developer, I am doing technical stuff (statistics, reporting, Business Intelligence). My customers are sometimes needing explanations and I simply can't make those explanations simple enough, because my behavior is defined by how much I understand and know in this area.
The gap between purely technical and layman language is what prompted the creation and large scale adoption of high level programming languages, for example. It's easier to (generally) work in C than ASM, and easier to (generally) work in WYSIWYG HTML editors (e.g. Dreamweaver) than in lathe HTML text filed directly.
I learned to value a "middleman" which can talk to both customers and developers and provide the link between them without pissing all off. Jokingly, I call them "human code interpreters". But I value them as such.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
TCP/IP didn't ship with Windows for Workgroups. It was a separate installation.
So...does this mean that this is the "year of the Linux desktop"? :-)
There are some uncomfortable comparisons here -
Much like Windows 3.11 the GUI in GUN/Linux isn't a core part of the OS - but a graphics server with window managers on top and all the real work being done by the OS under the manager.
So in NT-based versions of Windows, how much work (if any) would it take to have it boot up with a 25x80 console accepting cmd.exe-style (or PowerShell-style?) commands and no GUI? I.e., to what extent are there any OSes where the GUI is a "core part of the OS" in whatever sense is meant by that? (If you think you have such an OS, try logging in as ">console" first. :-))
Or, because they have a sense of humor. Something sorely lacking in most MS apologists.
Yes, Atari and BeOS: What do you guys have to say about this?
...*crickets chirping*
Hello? Anyone there?
sig: sauer
No, the preloaded Linux distributions listed stunk. Crappy repos, and limited updates. Aftermarket Linux distros (eg: Ubuntu-based distros, I found Crunchbang worked great, with full repo support) had a really good experience, and would have done well if they were preloaded.
I maintain that OEM's wanted cheap licences from Microsoft, and their approach was to sell Netbooks that shipped with Linux to scare Microsoft. Half my Xandros-preloaded EeePC 701's manual was about how to install XP, and it is what I'd consider "the first Netbook", back when Microsoft was cutting off XP support.
Unfortunately the whole thing went into a death spiral. Microsoft provided cheap licences (XP-Home, then 7-Starter), but eternally limited the platform specs (1GB RAM, 160, then 250GB Hard drive, and crappy Atom-class processors), in collusion with Intel who wanted to sell Ultrabooks at 4x the cost of a Netbook and claim they are what people really want. Over the course of 4 years (2008-2012, the mainstream life of the Atom-HDD-based netbook), the specs didn't improve appreciably. There is a certain niche of an ultraportable, ultralow cost full fledge PC (not a tablet) that Netbooks did indeed fill. And they could have thrived if allowed to grow. If you look around you can find decent low cost ~12" laptops eg This C$370 11.6" Core i3, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD http://www.futureshop.ca/en-CA/product/acer-acer-aspire-v5-11-6-laptop-silver-intel-core-i3-2365m-500gb-hdd-4gb-ram-windows-8-v5-171-6815/10223555.aspx
Have you heard of Windows Server Core? It's almost console mode, since it boots you to a command prompt window with available GUI for applications like Notepad. I guess they accepted the fact that all the commonly-available monitors are at least SVGA-compatible by now, and built it accordingly.
The previous name was "Unicycling Gorilla".
It's not like they were going for the business corporate naming scheme anyway.
Recursion jokes never end.
Only infinite resursion jokes never end.
Sorta. It "boots" to running a startup script that executes a series of CLI commands (to mount various directories as aliases and to move some critical libraries to a RAM disk) before (usually) ending in a call to LoadWB, which prompts the system to load up the graphical workbench. When I had an Amiga I almost always left that step off my startup script because I did my work from, more often than not, the CLI, not the clumsy Workbench.
planet texture maps and more
You get to keep a little more privacy than with the NSA version
Having a graphical system outside the OS is a desirable feature and not a drawback. It means that people that don't like Gnome3, Unity, CDE (yes, the old Sun thing) or twm are not forced to use any of those if they don't want to. The main thing we learnt years ago about a Common Desktop Environment is that nobody wanted one if they didn't have a stake in it themselves.
On Atari the operating system, known as TOS, was separate from the GUI, which was GEM. That meant that games could run without GEM even starting and that alternative GUIs known as "gemini" could run.
IPX was hard but the carrot of being able to play multiplayer doom drove some of us on to success :)
NetBEUI
Oh fuck. The horrors. Oh fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.
How about decades of programming in various environments with blatant differences in quality based on work ethic. FYI there's a fuckton of information and research on this.
Brilliant!.
Your statement fits the bill perfectly: random off the top of your head examples cherry picked at random from unverifiable sources.
Well played sir! Well played.
And posting as AC to boot. Bonus points for style!
Well, if you want specific examples, one of the items I was specifically thinking of the time was the IBM VSAM program logic manual circa 198x. Or do you have to have the actual IBM SCXX publication order code before you'll be satisfied? Prime Computer did some very entertaining documentation as well - being based in Massachusetts, they liked to spike their docs with references to HP Lovecraft's New England and Miskatonic University. The Commodore Amiga group had a lot of run as well. I have an A1000 computer with the paw imprint of Jay Miner's dog embossed on the inside of the lid.
On the flip side, SCO (before they changed owners and starting suing Linux) was so grim I turned and walked away from it. Intuit is no fun at all. Oracle and HP have abominable search engines, but your call is VERY important to them. And I have to be paid pretty well to sit and feel my life leaching away waiting for them to serve all their other customers because the documentation was written in Mordor and is neither entertaining nor informative.
There are a number of horribly expensive and unfunny program products I've dealt with and discarded over the years. I purposely refrain from recalling their names because I don't want to summon the other unpleasant memories that would rise like bile along with their names.
As to who has the better work ethic, I don't give a damn. All I care about is what they do to my work experience. And my experience has been that the more the developers enjoyed their jobs, the more enjoyable - and productive - my job becomes.
This made OS/2 ironically better at multitasking windows and DOS applications than it was at OS/2 applications. Windows apps couldn't lock the input queue and could be run in separate instances of Windows so that if one crashed, you wouldn't bring the others down. If you opened a command prompt you could do multi-taskey things like format a disk and print something at the same time. The trick was you had to use the command line format and not the pretty GUI one.
Ah IBM. Always reaching for awesome and always falling just a little bit short. The problem with them was they viewed the PC line as toys. You didn't use a PC to multitask. You used it as a dumb terminal to a mainframe. If you wanted to multitask, you dropped 5 digits on an AIX machine. Shitty CDE gui and all. I discovered Linux shortly before they announced they were killing OS/2, and Linux was really what I wanted anyway -- UNIX on my PC without having to pay SCO several thousand dollars for the OS (Which was something like $1200) TCP/IP (Which IIRC they wanted another grand for) and a goddamn C compiler.
Ahh the good ol days...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It got panned by people who didn't know what they were buying, but knew enough to not like something different. It's that treacherous middle-ground of kinda-sorta-ish knowing what they're doing and hating anything that isn't exactly what they learned on. High- and low-level users got exactly what they wanted.