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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?

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  1. Re:"More Professional Than Ever" by brantondaveperson · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.