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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.
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.
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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
It's actually Eric Raymond's own distro: http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/gun-linux
c++;
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.
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.
Or, because they have a sense of humor. Something sorely lacking in most MS apologists.
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.
Most of the Windows laptops I look at are using 2 to 3GB of RAM. There is almost zero demand for RAM beyond 4GB among consumers, and that's absolutely correct. You have the cause/effect backwards. The migration to 64 bits wasn't slow because people couldn't get the software. It was slow because the faster hardware didn't help very much, making it impossible to cost justify putting any work into that.
Adding more RAM to machine that is only caching a few GB before a reboot will not increase its speed at all. Speed certainly wouldn't double by having twice as much RAM. The reason why people are spending money on SSD instead of RAM is because memory only helps once you've read data from disk once. There are some small uses of RAM for things like temporary files, but those are not common on consumer workloads either.
Back when all of the mass market machines were dipping into swap to run their normal application, adding RAM made them much faster. And that move was held back a little bit by the 32 bit memory limit. Those days are years in the rear view now though. I upgraded all of my laptops from 8GB to 16GB of RAM recently, and there was no responsiveness improvement for day to day work. I'm just not using more than 8GB very often, unless I get crazy with the number of web browser tabs going at once.
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
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.
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.