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Linux 3.17-rc2 Release Marks 23 Years of the Linux Kernel

An anonymous reader writes Linus Torvalds released Linux 3.17-rc2 today in commemoration of the 23rd anniversary of the original kernel announcement. It was on 25 August 1991 that he announced his new OS project to the Minix users list.

55 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. So, 23 years ago he was trolling by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Posting in an incorrect listserv about his new OS. Good work, Linux, on 23 years of hardcore trolling.

    1. Re:So, 23 years ago he was trolling by LordKronos · · Score: 1

      Furthermore, in the very first reply, somebody is already trying to port linux (to an amiga)

    2. Re:So, 23 years ago he was trolling by AchilleTalon · · Score: 2

      Wow, time flies! Soon it will be the 20th anniversary of Linux on the Desktop Year.

      --
      Achille Talon
      Hop!
    3. Re:So, 23 years ago he was trolling by GreatDrok · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "Wow, time flies! Soon it will be the 20th anniversary of Linux on the Desktop Year."

      You think you're funny but I first had Linux as my desktop in 1995 and shortly after I was one of the founding members of our university Linux User Group.

      --
      "I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
    4. Re:So, 23 years ago he was trolling by gl4ss · · Score: 1

      in the timezone about 1995-1996 linux had better drivers and more drivers than windows 95. I ran linux on desktop back then because it was better in almost every possible way!

      isdn worked pretty much "out of the box"(out of the stack of cd's bought from local pc shop).

      graphics cards worked just fine. when 3dfx voodoo came out, it worked on linux just fine. soundcards worked just fine. you could run bigger virtual desktops than on windows with ease. friggin realmedia released software at the same time for linux and windows - so did a lot of other big name companies of the day.

      it was a bit of downhill from there though.. so yeah it will be the 20th anniversary of linux on the desktop soon.

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    5. Re:So, 23 years ago he was trolling by lkernan · · Score: 1

      in the timezone about 1995-1996 linux had better drivers and more drivers than windows 95..

      So a 3 year old OS had more drivers than a 3 month old OS, big surprise there. Newsflash, at that stage, DOS had more drivers than Win95.

    6. Re:So, 23 years ago he was trolling by whereiswaldo · · Score: 1

      Ever stop to think that maybe it was just a simple statement of fact and not meant to take all credit for being the first goddam person to get a Linux desktop install working? Chill out.

    7. Re:So, 23 years ago he was trolling by marcello_dl · · Score: 1

      Ok, but then let's consider the fact that in 2002 you could install the powerpc port of linux on a powerbook and have everything, gigabit ethernet, 3d, wireless, sound, firewire, working with open source drivers (the modem required a blob). While now you have trouble with firmware, drivers, boot process, even finding the keys to boot into bios/uefi mode. No I am not talking about the crypto keys, the KEYBOARD keys are not so well documented for new laptops.

      In other words, if hardware makers hadn't all these advantages with OSes where upgrading is a commercial, not technical matter (windows, OSX, and possibly systemd/linux if I know my onions) you'd already have had a trouble free desktop linux experience 10 years ago. I switched around that time and am quite satisfied. Captcha: "prouder"

      --
      ---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
  2. "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like by BeanBagKing · · Score: 4, Insightful

    heh :)

  3. A Fat and Bloated 23! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Like many of us it needs work at trimming down its size. So take it easy on the birthday cake etc.

    (Before moderators get all wound up, Linus has been saying it himsellf for years.)

  4. Hail Eris by Richy_T · · Score: 3, Funny

    Hail Discordia.

    1. Re:Hail Eris by smittyoneeach · · Score: 1

      Fnord to the Hagbard Celine!

      --
      Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
    2. Re:Hail Eris by Nimey · · Score: 1

      The Law of Fives is a hoax. Hail Eris!

      --
      Hail Eris, full of mischief...

      E pluribus sanguinem
  5. The Linux community needs to discuss systemd. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I know you're just trying to disturb shit with your comment, but you do indirectly bring up a good point: systemd and how it's contrary to everything that UNIX stands for.

    Like almost everyone else, I'd heard about it. I heard the complaints, but I didn't take them seriously. Then, almost three weeks ago, I had to install and use Fedora for the first time in a number of years.

    Everything negative that people have said about systemd is true. The problems they point out are as real as can be. Binary log files? Jesus Christ. One daemon that does just about everything? Jesus Christ. systemd shits upon the UNIX philosophy in every way possible.

    More and more distros have started using systemd. Soon people won't have a choice; they'll be subjected to systemd whether they like it or not. Decades of UNIX and Linux knowledge is being flushed down the shitter, replaced with a something that's more at home in the world of Windows than it ever should be in the land of UNIX.

    Over two decades on, the Linux community is facing its biggest threat yet. systemd is the kind of software that will render Linux irrelevant in the server market, just because it disregards decades of wisdom in favor of a one-size-fits-all approach that has never worked well in the past.

    The Linux community needs to discuss systemd, before it's too late!

    1. Re: The Linux community needs to discuss systemd. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      You ignore the benefits like vendor lockin. They kill bsd compatibility with xorg and make it hard to adopt way land. They forgot Linux is a clone.

    2. Re:The Linux community needs to discuss systemd. by x0ra · · Score: 2

      I've been using Fedora and BSDs for a few years now, I didn't notice any specific difference in using any of them. Editing text files is fun, but there has never been any such thing as a standardized configuration syntax. At some point UI are just better to use. I used to be pro-textfile but I'm fed up of looking up the syntax. Sendmail is a mess, bind is a mess, exim is a mess, samba is a mess...

    3. Re:The Linux community needs to discuss systemd. by freeze128 · · Score: 1

      That's OK, there are still Microsoft Solutions...

    4. Re:The Linux community needs to discuss systemd. by AchilleTalon · · Score: 1

      FUD about systemd is grossly exagerrated. I, myself, migrated to systemd about two weeks ago because I was required to do so (before I learned afterward I could have stick with the openrc scripts stuff) in a migration to Gnome 3, outch! I mean I had a hard time with all these migrations, including GRUB 2.

      I really hate the Linux world that very day I manage to migrate. I wasn't able to find what I was accustomed to and do my things the old comfortable way I was used to. However, I must say after two weeks, that is not that bad and you will always find people that resist any change. Once I worked for IBM many decades ago, we were often depicted as evil because AIX was a sacrilege in the face of the SunOS sysadmins with its tool to ease system administration with clever checking of options and so on. It was perceived as a OS for the faint. What was really important to a customer? Preserve the machism of his sysadmins or improve the management and reduce the costs to manage the infrastructure making it possible to build more complex environment without spending all the money on the system administration?

      It is about the same story with systemd, even if it is not as sophisticated as the AIX administration tool, it standardized many things. It is just a matter to take time to learn the new system, something not everyone is willing to do, I must admit, but it is not more complicated than the set of scripts used by the old initialization system.

      And, yes, I must also admit I was really hating Gnome 3 at first, now I took time to understand better the desktop shell and I like it more than Gnome 2, the weak point being not everything is yet properly documented. Since it is open software working on a voluntary base, it will take time and if people are just reluctant to work with the new system and learn it, it will just be longer before a better documentation becomes available. Remember what Open Source is all about? Scratch a itch.

      --
      Achille Talon
      Hop!
    5. Re:The Linux community needs to discuss systemd. by armanox · · Score: 1

      Actually, being good at Exchange requires being good at PowerShell these days.

      --
      I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
    6. Re:The Linux community needs to discuss systemd. by LordLimecat · · Score: 2

      Binary log files?

      Im still not sure I understand the issue here. All data is binary, some of it is simply encoded ASCII in a way that many utilities can parse.

      But if you have a better encoding that is widely known and supported, who cares if its not ASCII? mySQL isnt ASCII, but you dont here people blowing their lids that you cant fix a borked mySQL instance with cat and vim.

      Point being-- I get that its nice for "cat" to "just work" when your system is hosed, but if theres another utility that all distros have that "just works", who cares?

  6. Re:23 years of being a rounding error by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    After 23 years of consistently having your ass handed to you by Microsoft, you think Linus would have a little more humility. You know your software is complete shit when people willingly shell out hundreds of dollars for a superior product rather than use your product for free.

    Ya, windows is winning. Except for the server room. And the tablet and smartphone spaces. And the embedded world. In fact, Linux is kicking windows to the curb pretty much everywhere except the desktop.

  7. Re:23 years of being a rounding error by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Shell out is funny :>

  8. Oh Lord by Greyfox · · Score: 2

    Doesn't feel like that long. Admittedly a lot of the 90's is a blur. Hey, hey, you guys remember that time when the Linux kernel went over 10 MB and we predicted it would destroy the Internet?

    --

    I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?

    1. Re:Oh Lord by Greyfox · · Score: 1

      The source tarball. Everyone was like "Oooh all the people downloading a 10MB source tarball will DESTROY THE INTERNET!"

      --

      I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?

    2. Re:Oh Lord by Richy_T · · Score: 1

      *looks around*

      Are you sure it didn't?

    3. Re:Oh Lord by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      Or downloading one CD over a 56K modem took a better part of a week?

  9. Re:23 years of being a rounding error by x0ra · · Score: 1

    Base product cost is not the only determining factor. You can hardly go against Microsoft indoctrination of people, or the myriad of course for basic spreadsheet & words processing software, just the same way you can hardly use anything but Adobe product when you are doing image processing.

  10. Re:23 years of being a rounding error by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Step 1) Learn to speak english
    Step 2) Shut the fuck up because what you have to say is stupid regardless of your ability to speak the language.

  11. Kinda amazing by Hamsterdan · · Score: 1

    "won't be big and
    professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."

    "It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never
    will support anything other than AT-harddisks"

    Yet it runs on about 80% of all cell phones, runs on routers, servers, even on my orange iMac (G3)

    Give that man many thanks...

    --
    I've got better things to do tonight than die.
    1. Re:Kinda amazing by jones_supa · · Score: 1

      It's always interesting to browse the Linux 0.01 source tree. I would say that it was pretty good code from the very beginning.

    2. Re:Kinda amazing by KozmoStevnNaut · · Score: 1

      Red Hat used to hand out a poster with the complete Linux 0.01 source code, at trade fairs etc. It's pretty neat.

      --
      Eat the rich.
  12. Re:23 years of being a rounding error by Hamsterdan · · Score: 1

    That's because you can buy a 400$ PC at Walmart. (the laptop's gonna break in 2 years, but people don't really care about that since they'll be able to buy a new one)

    --
    I've got better things to do tonight than die.
  13. Re:23 years of being a rounding error by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 2

    It has little to do with "indoctrination" of people, but familiarity is something of a factor, of course.

    More critically, I think, Microsoft established a very large software ecosystem that Linux was never able to match as a relative late-comer, and catching up was nearly impossible without a critical mass that Windows enjoys. The simple reason people use Windows is because of the massive ecosystem of products available for the platform. Linux has some fine software, but there are many, many times the number of applications available for Windows, some of which are pretty damned specialized and are simply not available on other platforms.

    There's a reason Linux is able to complete so well in other areas. In the server market, for example, the job is largely about serving up standard internet protocols, and so a free product is a huge win with no compatibility-related downsides. In the small-form device market, the open and free nature is also a big win, where margins are very tight, and vendors want to be able to customize their offering.

    But the desktop relies on software written for specific platforms, so the ecosystem is everything. Microsoft has been extremely effective at courting third-party developers with excellent tools, services, and documentation. Windows has also enjoyed excellent long-term binary backward compatibility, which is hugely important for business software and the businesses that use them. So, to me, it's not hard to see why they've maintained their domination on the desktop.

    --
    Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
  14. 23 Years of LINUX by hackus · · Score: 2

    Year of the Linux desktop!?

    Sorry, just had to post that.

    Thank God for open source LINUX.

    Seriously.

    I would be running a chain of Indian Restaurants long ago if the only thing I was doing was product management of Wind0ze machines.

    LINUS thanks for the greatest occupation anyone could want: LINUX Admin/LINUX Programmer.

    PS: I need to buy LINUS something, but what do you do for a man that has all the source code? MMMmmmm....

    --
    Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
  15. Poll idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    How many years have you been using Linux:
    1-5 Years
    6-10 years
    11-15 years
    15-20 years
    I am Linus!

    FWIW: I started back in 1993! 21 years, back in the pre-1.0 versions!

    1. Re:Poll idea by bigfinger76 · · Score: 1

      I "started" around 2000 or so with Mandrake. I learned the hard way about winmodems that year.

    2. Re:Poll idea by x0ra · · Score: 1

      around 2000 with a Debian Potato.

    3. Re:Poll idea by jones_supa · · Score: 1

      I started in 1999 with Red Hat 6.

      Looking at the replies, I'd say that during the change of millennium Linux had one of it's biggest breakthroughs.

    4. Re:Poll idea by TeknoHog · · Score: 1

      I started in 1999 with Red Hat 6.

      Me too :D And now for the obligatory shameless plug.

      --
      Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
    5. Re:Poll idea by thsths · · Score: 1

      I had some pre-1.0 versions, but no internet connection. The first version I really used was 1.0.8 -nli one via the university 128kBit link. Luckily that got better soon afterwards.

      And later I was really excited about KDE 1.0. I think it had many good ideas and was quite nice to use, if a bit RAM hungry. Unfortunately many of those nice ideas got removed in KDE 2.0 :-(

    6. Re:Poll idea by Gollum · · Score: 1

      0.99p30, IIRC

    7. Re:Poll idea by Gollum · · Score: 1

      Ah, that would be 0.99p13, I know there was a gap there somewhere.

    8. Re:Poll idea by xming · · Score: 1

      22 years give or take, started with SLS, can't remember which version probably older than this one ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/hist... as I can vaguely remember kernel 0.97 but SLS 1.03 has kernel 0.98pl.

      FWIW this is the first Linux distro (there are earlier versions but I didn't bother to search) ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/hist...

      And the place to get your kernel was ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/linux/

    9. Re:Poll idea by CronoCloud · · Score: 1

      I'm relatively new to linux...only 12 years. It was a Red Hat 6 variant.

  16. You're not making much sense by dutchwhizzman · · Score: 1

    Sendmail is historiy just as bind is history. Sendmail uses m4 for it's configuration files (you shouldn't edit the "compiled" stuff), so it's not sendmail that is culprit here. Bind is history because there's powerDNS now. Exim and samba aren't a mess, but they do use "text files" for configuration.

    Anyway, they all use a standard, since it's human readable ascii. It may be obscure since there isn't much if anything that uses their format apart from themselves, but it's a standard. You could argue that all these apps should standardize on XML, but then you'd have all the tags that need to be standardized too. Going for binary files means humans will need extra software just to edit that and machine generating those will be harder too. The Windows Registry is a mess if I ever saw one and after about 20 years it's such a myriad of patches and additions that it's hardly managable.

    Standards are great, which is why everyone invents at least one new one. Pushing very different requirements into one standard usually makes it either too crippled to be useful or too bloated to be maintainable. Maybe it's you that needs to find something else to do if you can't muster up the energy to deal with these inconveniances anymore. There will always be incompatibilities and annoyances if you have to deal with technology so either put up or move on.

    --
    I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
  17. Re:23 years of being a rounding error by SlashRAH · · Score: 1

    Last I heard, Chromebook sales were good... Linux inside there too.

  18. Re:Using an old version by jones_supa · · Score: 1

    Which WiFi chip you have?

  19. Synclair QL by DrYak · · Score: 1

    at that point of time, Linus Torvalds was already used to constantly have to fix things himself and write the software he needed for the buggy and ill-supported Spectrum QL of his youth. Linux was far from his first project and he had a good experience in writing code at that time.

    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
  20. Is this what slashdot is reduced to .. by lippydude · · Score: 1

    Is this what slashdot is reduced to, providing a platform for a bunch of wintrolls ..

    1. Re:Is this what slashdot is reduced to .. by lippydude · · Score: 1

      ... "which starts to balance the 99.99% of articles where comments take the opportunity to bash MS

      Only a wintroll could see criticism of Microsoft in an article marking the release of Linux rev 3.17-rc2 ..

  21. Re:23 years of being a rounding error by Richy_T · · Score: 1

    If it were just about being good software, Lotus, Wordperfect and others would still be around. Make no mistake, if Linux were a regular closed software vendor, it would have become a vague memory long ago.

  22. Re:What would you like to see most in Linux? by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 1

    There is a major flaw in your post. You are asking for people to reply with things they dislike about the Linux kernel. By definition this means you are asking for feedback from people who have no knowlege of Linux, since everyone who knows about software and is familiar with Linux likes it :-)

    --
    Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
  23. Re:23 years of being a rounding error by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 1

    If it were just about being good software, Lotus, Wordperfect and others would still be around. Make no mistake, if Linux were a regular closed software vendor, it would have become a vague memory long ago.

    You know, I was around during the transition from WordPerfect to Word, and from Lotus 123 to Excel. Both of those products were held back by their legacy DOS codebases, and were extremely slow to transition to Windows, which is where everyone started moving, of course. When they finally did release Windows products, they were horrible. So, no, WordPerfect and 123 just lost out to competitors because they couldn't keep up with advances in technology - simple as that.

    I'm not sure what what had to do with Linux being a closed software vendor, though...? I agree that being open source is certainly one of it's strengths.

    --
    Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
  24. Re:23 years of being a rounding error by Richy_T · · Score: 1

    Microsoft would have had a way to kill it.

  25. Re: 23 years of being a rounding error by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    you forgot your sarcasm quotes. because windows is none of that