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Happy Birthday, Linux! An OS At 24
prisoninmate writes: It has been 24 long years since the first ever release of the Linux project on August 25, 1991, which is the core component of any GNU/Linux distribution. With this occasion we want to remind everyone that Linux is everywhere, even if you don't see it. You use Linux when you search on Google, when you use your phone, when buy metro tickets, actually the whole Internet is powered by Linux. Happy Birthday, Linux!
Except for where it is powered by Windows.
And I really hope Linux will last at least another 24 years (2039: they'll have to fix that 32 bit time since the Epoch, though).
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
And, all in all I have probably used more bytes downloading Linux related stuff than Pamela Anderson GIF:s
That's a very big 'probably' you got there, friend.
Correction: Happy Birthday GNU/Linux. After all, GNU software makes up 75% of the codebase of any "Linux" distribution. Show some respect.
Some of that gnu stuff is a LOT older than 24 years. I was using some of it under CP/M back before Linux started school.
It's the LINUX part of it that's having the birthday.
You should write an angry letter to your congressman.
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Like you, I use Linux professionally as well as at home, as a developer and user of many CAD and development tools. I've deployed it in embedded environments in a number of scientific intsruments. I simply don't recognise your experience. So I guess YMMV, but you need to take some anger management classes or change career.
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
Which really, the headline should not be identifying Linux as an OS.
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1991: Linux torvalds pulls a fresh cup of coffee off the pot and announces hes got an idea. Little does he know this idea will mean 24 years of shepherding a child through a forest of shady characters from Hans Reiser to Leonart Pottering.
1992: not even a year old and Linux is caught messing around with windows despite very specific instructions to practice her POSIX. she gets good at CIFS, confusing most of the parents around her and once she starts pretending to be a domain controller at the Active Directory dance its gloves off for the Microsoft PTA.
1998: Linux finishes her ALSA class and in 2 years starts singing the chart-toppers in mp3 format, much to the dismay of the RIAA.
2010: in a rebellious phase, Linux stops doing one thing and doing it well and starts hanging out with SystemD, who convinces her she can do anything all the time so long as hes in charge.
2011: Weird emo/goth/Gnome3 phase means Linux wears a lot more bling than she used to...Parents of Unix long since departed now sigh and stare at the shelf where the pictures of little Linux dressed in Bash rest alongside her achievement for learning computational fluid thermodynamics and wonder where they went so wrong.
2015: at 24 Linux flies planes handles social media, and directs traffic. She knows windows inside and out, and can hang out with everyone from stuffy government types to the art crowd. She composes music, builds cars, and even folds proteins when shes bored. Old man Torvalds still shows up from time to time to remind parents not to be lazy, friends not to be greedy, and people not to expect him to be around for every little thing Linux may or may not choose to do.
Happy 24th, Linux.
Good people go to bed earlier.
As soon as the system gets under 100% CPU or memory
I think I found your problem.
Curious as to why you would run Xubuntu at home if you hate Linux so much.
Title is accurate: The original announcement refers to an operating system, so this is the birth of the linux operating system.
Correction: Happy Birthday GNU/Linux. After all, GNU software makes up 75% of the codebase of any "Linux" distribution. Show some respect.
Actually last year they shipped more than one billion NotGNU/Linux devices, BusyBox means there's many non-GNU embedded devices and if GNU vanished most the gaps left would quickly be covered by LLVM to replace GCC and the BSD userland. And it's not nearly 75% GNU projects, perhaps 75% (L)GPL licensed code but that's not why RMS wanted to call it that.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Depends how you define an OS. Many - usually embedded- linux installations have the busybox toolset which has nothing to do with GNU apart from its license.
heh .. Such problems with Linux.. Funny how theres a bunch of us out there that have been using it since FOREVER (Slackware/1995 here..) and have ZERO problems with it... If this AC is *actually* having these kinda problems, either he's got seriously crap hardware or more likely he's just trolling... And with what a spyware-fest Windows 10 is, I suspect a LOT more people are gonna say "FUCK MS" and come over to the Linux side...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
Sure is interesting that all of the people posting about how bad Linux is are posting AC... Wonder why? Wonder if they're just trolls.. nah, couldn't be...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
I've been using Linux since about 1995, and am seriously impressed with how far its come since thern.. I started with Slackware and its bazillions of floppy disks and pulling my hair out getting XFree86 working, nowadays its easier to install something like Mint or Ubuntu than Windows, and in most cases the machine will be 100% operational after the install, nowhere NEAR always the case with Windows... I strongly suspect, with what a spyware-fest Windows 10 has turned out to be, Linux is gonna get a BIG boost in users in the not-too-distant future, once joe-six-pack figures out all of *his* data is now Microsofts... I for one will do everything I can to hurry it along..
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LINUX!!!!!
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
We decided to repurpose one of our shiny new 486DX2 (at 66Mhz!!) to a web server. The hard drive was not large enough to hold windows and the downloaded floppies for slackware. I stayed up all night, finding an open NFS export (at UIUC I think), and downloading each slackware floppy direct to disk one at a time using one of the NeXTs.
That doesn't even count the time trying to get X running right (which wasn't even needed for a web server!) Heady days I tell you!
Silence is a state of mime.
systemd is the future. Instead of getting your panties in a bunch, accept it and get on with your life.
Because of Linux, Solaris is no longer #1 OS. Meanwhile, Linux still has filesystems out of 20. century
memory overcommit is not turned off by default, basic data safety is not guaranteed, and now with systemd it behaves like Windows more than ever before. What a piece of crap OS.
If one of the BSD's were this popular, I would be fine with that, but in IT, it seems like biggest piece of crap always becomes the latest fad. Good job guys, the whole lot of you. Good job. Pat yourselves on the backs, idiots.
Yes it does, useful if you want to read old disks, but it also has many 21st century ones.
memory overcommit is not turned off by default, basic data safety is not guaranteed,
That's a two edge sword. In practice when running out of virtual memory Windows (without overcommit) comes to a halt, so it takes maybe 10 minutes to just bring up a menu. Linux (with overcommit) starts killing things. You are more likely to do a clean shutdown of the linux bits that havent been killed than of a windows box when this happens.,
and now with systemd it behaves like Windows more than ever before. ,
I haven't used it in anger enough to know. On a desktop it seems fine. I have a feeling that once I start serious server work it won't be nearly as flexible as init,
What a piece of crap OS.
If one of the BSD's were this popular, I would be fine with that, but in IT, it seems like biggest piece of crap always becomes the latest fad. Good job guys, the whole lot of you. Good job. Pat yourselves on the backs, idiots.
386BSD, the BSD for PC's from which almost all, if not all modern PC variants of BSD are descended from, first appeared in spring of 1992, after Linux had already been around for some number of months, albeit still in a very alpha state. Even though 386BSD was vastly technically superior to Linux when it first came out, at the time, Linux had simply far too many minor features that made it more amenable to the prevalent existing PC's at the time. Linux had floating point emulation, where BSD required a coprocessor (which at the time was still considered relatively luxurious), and Linux could co-exist with DOS on a hard disk with multiple partitions, while BSD initially had no such capability. By the time BSD had added these features, Linux had largely caught up with it in terms of being far less alpha-state.
Linux isn't popular because it is faddish, Linux is popular because back in the beginning, it did what people actually needed it to do, while the alternatives did not... and by the time others could also do so, Linux simply had too much of a head start. Linux maintained the lead ever since.
But does having a head start make something a fad?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You better believe I have an ax to grind.
I work with Linux every day, professionally. As soon as the system gets under 100% CPU or memory pressure it crashes. In Solaris (or any Illumos derivative), for that I have mdb, and I can debug a crashed kernel (and make it run again) with kdb. In Linux, that is science fiction.
At home I have Xubuntu. The piece of crap is so slow and bloated, it's become just like Windows. It started out relatively usable, and the more updates were applied, the slower it got. Many of the updates regularly had failure issues during boot. If I were not forced to (company policy) by idiots, I would never run Linux in production. What. A. Piece. Of. Crap.!
Virtualization technology in Linux? Crap.
GNU userland? Does not correspond to any industry norm or standard - crap (recursive grep(1), or TApe ARchiver, tar(1) which supports compression, anyone?) - crap.
Backward compatibility in Linux? Crap.
Post mortem debugging? Crap.
System startup, with million different solutions? Crap.
Crap, crap, crap! But hey, it's all the rage!!! Yes, you better believe I have an Ax to grind. And not just one ax!
That's epic. Curious, which distributions are you trying to deploy in your (claimed) professional usage?
The only time I have experienced random crashes, and lockups are with bleeding edge distros (Mainly *buntu/Mint, for some reason Mint always dead-locks for me regardless of the machine it's put on)
Meanwhile, If you are indeed using Linux professionally, then you need a professional/enterprise distro. Such as SUSE Enterprise Server or Redhat Enterprise server.
I've deployed these in VERY demanding environments before and they have almost always stood the test of time. Heck in one instance the CPU cooked before the OS gave up (Cooling system failed).
Now, if you're using xuBuntu, this is okay for general home use. But I wouldn't consider it for judging the stability of GNU/Linux at all.
CentOS/RHEL with XFCE would give you a good idea on stability however. Ever thought maybe you're using the wrong distro for the task at hand?
I tend to use which distro suites the task I need, for my workstation it's CentOS7 with XFCE, for servers it's usually RHEL6/7, for my personal laptop it's Arch Linux..
So tell me, what are you running that could possibly be so broken? Have you considered it could also be poor configuration?
(Slackware/1995 here..) and have ZERO problems with it.
Nostalgia has clouded your vision. I tried to run Linux on my primary system from around 1999 to 2002. (It as too flaky, prior to that, to be more than a curiosity) I spend far more time trying to get various things to work than actually using it. (Remember when getting sound to work was a major accomplishment?) It was a huge pain back then. It's a lot better today (my wife ran it with little trouble from 2008 to 2011) but it's still not quite ready for the desktop. (She abandoned it when she needed to use her computer for work.) The only reason to run it back in 1995 was because you enjoyed tinkering with it. It was completely unsuitable for daily use.
And with what a spyware-fest Windows 10 is, I suspect a LOT more people are gonna say "FUCK MS" and come over to the Linux side.
Given the popularity of Google Chrome, even among the privacy hawks on Slashdot, I'd bet against that.
Required reading for internet skeptics
I love over-reaching statements that are obviously wrong.
So, everything that comprises the whole internet is running a Linux kernel?
I doubt it.
If one of the BSD's were this popular, I would be fine with that...
I've done product development on the BSDs. Believe me, the grass is equally brown on both sides of that fence.
Are there any good articles about that? The stuff I have read has made me leery of Windows 10.
Here's an Ars Technica article about it. I think it covers most of the issues people are concerned about. I'm moderately concerned about these issues myself, but on the other hand, I do need to keep current for development work.
Also, you could try setting up VirtualBox on one of your Windows machines, and running Linux inside the VirtualBox. The virtual hardware inside VirtualBox is well-understood by Linux, so you should be able to stop worrying about hardware and focus on learning your way around Linux and doing stuff with it.
Yep, already did that. Tried out Mint Cinnamon, and really liked it - clean, professional looking, intuitive. I was doing some contract work, so didn't want to mess with my personal dev machine. Now that I'm done for the moment, I'm a bit more free to consider updating my machine for dual-boot use. I need full access to GPU hardware to get real work done.
Any particular reason you'd recommend MATE over Cinnamon, incidentally?
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.