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Linux Turns 25, Is Bigger and More Professional Than Ever (arstechnica.com)
The Linux operating system kernel is 25 years old this month, ArsTechnica writes. It was August 25, 1991 when Linus Torvalds posted his famous message announcing the project, claiming that Linux was "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu." From the article: But now, Linux is far bigger and more professional than Torvalds could have imagined. Linux powers huge portions of the Internet's infrastructure, corporate data centers, websites, stock exchanges, the world's most widely used smartphone operating system, and nearly all of the world's fastest supercomputers. The successes easily outweigh Linux's failure to unseat Microsoft and Apple on PCs, but Linux has still managed to get on tens of millions of desktops and laptops and Linux software even runs on Windows.Do you use any Linux-based operating system? Share your experience with it. What changes would you want to see in it in the next five years?
Nope, Linus still leads the project, and he is employee of non-profit 501(c)(6) trade association
It's GNU software that runs on Windows.. There's not even a bit of Linux because it is a clean room implementation.
er, Linux is just the kernel.
The GNU utilities (not corporate) and other open source wares (let's analyze that a bit) that make up the rest of the OS, are the big pieces corporate controlled?
server:
apache web server and tomcat java ee server: 501(c)(3) charitable organization, Apache Foundation
PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl, node.js., the big web platforms...nope
mysql - yes oracle, BUT
mariadb is now used more than mysql, community led
postgresql -
java - oracle, very corporate controlled really
desktop:
the major desktops are community led
mozilla foundation: non-profit
chrome browser - yup google
adobe flash - yup though going away in favor of html5
So on the desktop I could choose to be corporate-ware based, or not...
So why then is there always a post in every Windows article describing how you disable something by adding some strange named variable fifty levels deep into the registry? Windows can keep on doing shit like that and no one cares because it's Windows. That is the stronghold you get on the user base from creating a monopoly in the 80:ies and 90:ies.
We gave up on Windows shortly after Windows 2000. I migrated the entire family to Linux fifteen years ago, and we never looked back. My daughter wrote her master's thesis on Open Office on a Linux system (I remember it's being a KDE desktop). I enjoy the idea of not paying money every time I need to do something different.
One caveat, however. Normal people need someone with computer experience to maintain Linux for them. My family had me, and my son. At this point, that's a requirement, not an option.
Instead of whining about it you could disable the memory overcommit by adding "vm.overcommit_memory=2" to /etc/sysctl.conf and run "sysctl -p" (so that the setting takes immediate effect so you don't have to reboot).
Look man, you just don't know how to use your operating system. Perhaps you need to go on a course. All the things you're complaining about aren't problems, once you know your keyboard shortcuts better. Windows alt-tabs through everything, which doesn't scale well with large numbers of windows. Mac alt-tabs through applications, and alt-backticks through windows within that application. Different approach. Being a mac, of course, there are loads of really nice tools that you can install to customise the behaviour of your system (contrary to popular belief). In your case, I suggest that you install Witch (Here). Yes, it costs money. The horror. It's nearly the price of two beers. Explain to me again why the hard work of software developers should be available to everyone for free, again? I forgot the details on that one. If you don't like the maximising behavour, there are tools to sort that out for you. I use BetterTouchTool myself.
It's ironic that someone who wants to install Linux, which pretty much entirely consists of little plugin tools to make stuff happen, hasn't bothered to go looking for the little plugin tools that can customise OSX for you.
Regarding your broken MBP, that's a shame. However, computers do break occasionally, and since you haven't bothered to look it up, you can hold down Cmd+V for a verbose boot, or Cmd+R for the recovery console, which will actually download an entire OS install from the internet and re-install your entire machine for you if you want - including pulling in your time machine backup (you have a backup, right?). Or, if it's something less drastic, you can start the mac in single-user mode (Cmd+S), or try some of the other tools from the recovery mode.
I mean, I get you don't like OSX, and that's fine. But nothing in what you wrote is actually correct, and so I hope I was helpful, and not too patronising, in correcting you. And what exactly don't you like about installing stuff on a mac? Sure beats windows installers - and apt-get on Linux just craps out half the time (I guess I'm doing it wrong... touche...). Android follows more of the OSX model, which is that everything lives in the application package, and you don't bother with sharing components between applications because it causes far more problems than it solves.
>Explain to me again why the hard work of software developers should be available to everyone for free, again?
Nobody has ever said that. No really. Nobody ever said that. No. Not even RMS. Free software has nothing to do with price and a lot of free software does cost money. There is no rule against charging for free software and it doesn't make it any less free.
That said...why would I pay even the price of two beers for something that somebody else is offering me free of charge ? When the gratis one also happens to be free (as in freedom) then it wins on every count and there is no sane reason to want the for-pay one.
Anyway, customizing your desktop is such a fundamental feature that the idea that you need third-party tools to do it is a massive black mark against OSX. If you were trying to sell if by saying that, you failed miserably. I've never yet wanted to make a change to the behaviour of my KDE desktop that I could not do within KDE using tools shipped by the KDE project and included in the original install.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *