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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?
Do you use any Linux-based operating system?
No, that's why I'm here on this linux loving website shit posting about microsoft since the late 90s
Of course it is "More Professional Than Ever". Its a corporate led project now, not a hobbyist led project anymore. Most of the development is corporate or corporate sponsored, either way corporations guide Linux's development.
>> I'm afraid that is 64 tasks max (and one is used as swapper), no matter :-)
>> how small they should be. Fragmentation is evil - this is how it was
>> handled. As the current opinion seems to be that 64 Mb is more than
>> enough, but 64 tasks might be a little crowded, I'll probably change the
>> limits be easily changed (to 32Mb/128 tasks for example) with just a
>> recompilation of the kernel. I don't want to be on the machine when
>> someone is spawning >64 processes, though
If only he knew...
It's GNU software that runs on Windows.. There's not even a bit of Linux because it is a clean room implementation.
What changes would you want to see in it in the next five years?
Still waiting for the year of the desktop. A viable alternative to osx (and ms) for multimedia work, specifically, professional level audio engineering work.
What does this word mean in regard to the Linux kernel? Or it should be applied to Linux/GNU?
Sorry, this article is some marketing BS. I've no idea how it found its way to /.
If I may, and even if I mayn't, I'm going to rant about the same thing I always rant about in these stories: usability. Desktop Linux is a great operating system for those who have put in the many hours needed to understand its quirks. It's a great operating system for people who never so much as install a new sound driver. For the remaining 80% of users it's a usability nightmare. The wide range of distro's running the Gnome and KDE mean many common interactions differ between computers. And the Linux/Unix ideology of each program doing one thing (and doing it well) means which programs a user will have is unpredictable.
This, in turn, means it's all but impossible to provide a simple, straightforward instruction to a user for how to do something with her machine. Even something that should be dead simple. As soon as a user has to modify a config file or open a command prompt that's a huge roadblock. And no I'm not saying "be like Windows". That implication is a cop-out.It's not about doing things the way Windows does them, it's about making it "just work", and when it doesn't offering highly intuitive graphical interfaces for changing the way it works.
The Linux development community has made huge strides in this direction, but more is needed. Write drivers that interface with Gnome and KDE environments and provide GUI's for every setting. If a driver doesn't gave a Gnome and KDE GUI that covers 99.99% of use cases it's not finished. Make it so a user never, ever has to open a command prompt. Stick to the top three or fewer interfaces, and make them rock solid. No more installing interfaces to install interfaces to install decompressers to compile drivers. Do this and you shall see the year of Linux on the desktop.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I remember when Linus posted it. I downloaded it and played with it a bit.
When Slackware 0.99a came out I gave it another try. It was not long before I was converting my Minix boxes at the house over to Linux.
In 1995 I switched from Windows 3.11 to Slackware and never looked back. To this day I run linux on all my systems at home save a small laptop that runs Windows XP though it is just to manage the spectrophotometer which does not have a linux driver.
Linux has come a long way and I am always amazed at how much of the world runs linux from Cell Phones, to routers, to supercomputers.
I first ran Linux back in the mid-90's though it's been a while since I did much with it (maybe like 5 years). Back when I started it was 2 generations ahead of Windows at least, destroyed it in terms of performance and stability, and was just a lot more fun to use. Fast forward to today and any lead has pretty much evaporated. Recently when I got too annoyed at how slow Windows 10 was running on a cheap laptop I picked up (4 gigs of RAM, AMD a4-6210 and a SSD), I decided to replace it with Linux and was honestly pretty underwhelmed. Performance was about the same, and this was a Linux Mint distro running XFCE with bells and whistles turned off. It was still sluggish to the point that it was annoying. The user experience was pretty much identical to what I remember from 10 years ago. Honestly, if I installed a 10-year-old distro it would probably scream. I'm not a programmer so not sure what could be done at this point; even Torvalds has admitted the kernel is bloated, and as a user it seems like the graphics system is just an increasing number of layers, managers, and toolkits piled on top of each other.
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.
At the risk of starting a flame war I think if Linux is going to get traction on the desktop it needs more thinking like the Linux Mint. I think both Windows and Ubuntu made the mistake of following trendy ideas at the expense of the user. When my elderly parents we faced with moving from XP to Windows 8 I moved them to Mint and they have been happy Linux users for years now.
The most useful thing for average users is making the GUI config tools easy to use by a lay person, and doing it without breaking the traditional config files people like myself are used to working with. In this respect I think Mint is suitable for large percentage of average users but the focus needs to be on the small but significant number of cases where it is not possible to get a system up and running properly without opening a command line window.
I think it was around 1992, I was browsing ftp.txt files at multiple ftp sites and kept running into this "linux" thing. I was a CS student, so I looked into it more and found out it was a UNIX OS for PCs. I thought cool and thought I'd try it. 40 diskettes later downloaded from the student computer lab and I was installing it onto my computer at home. I hardly knew anything about partitions on a hard drive at the time and easily wiped out my Windows 3.1 partition. When I finally got it to boot up and got a 2400 baud SLIP connection going back to school, I couldn't believe it. I would start Netscape, go wash the dishes and come back in time to see the page loaded. (It wasn't even porn! That took a LOT longer!) Since then I've had Linux installed on all of my personal machines. Since 1999, I've had Linux installed on all of my work machines and around 2008 I got rid of my last Windows machine and have run Linux exclusively.
Linux has helped me build several products and has provided countless hours of learning. Praise be to Linus and GNU and all of the other people that helped make this possible.
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).
I ditched Windows back in 1998 and installed RedHat 5.1. It was awesome! Then I upgraded. Wow, what a nightmare. Dependency hell. I struggled with it for a few years, but hung in there because I just loved it and had no interest in going back to Windows. Macs make my brain hurt.
Then along came Mandrake which took away some of the pain. That was great as well, really liked KDE. Upgrades were still painful, but much better.
Then I started hearing a lot about Ubuntu so I made the leap to Kubuntu 6.06. I went through about 8 in-place upgrades over time (minorly painful) until I finally things got unstable enough that I did a fresh install. Things were much better... but I kept having issues with KDE wigging out on me and pegging my cpu.
So I installed XFCE on top of Kubuntu. XFCE spoke to me - I realized all the UI flash didn't matter to me. I would flip back to KDE, but the problem kept happening and I was happy with XFCE. Eventually I heard about Mint around 2011, and had to try Mint XFCE - I have been there since. I have decided to not do rolling installs anymore, but I am configured pretty well to do full installs. I just installed over my Mint 17 XFCE release and was up and running on Mint XFCE 18 in about an hour. (my / partition is 55 GB and only uses about 12, and I have a separate partition for home). This was the smoothest linux system update I have ever had - even no issues with the Nvidia proprietary drivers!
Installs aside, my Linux system does everything I want it to do. Seeing all the various applications on it grow and blossom, and really cool things like bootable distros to embedded linux to mini systems to android. It has really been great to see it all flourish.
At work I use Windows 10, and I get by. But it brings me no joy. At home I run Linux, and it brings me joy. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to it.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I use Linux Mint exclusively on my laptop, soon to be on all of my PCs.
For 90% of home users almost any Linux distro will serve them just fine. If they just need email, browsing, and online shopping, Linux will do everything they want.
For professional shops it's a bit different since there are lots of applications that will never be ported to Linux, but as more and more stuff moves to the web I expect that will change over time. Graphics-heavy stuff will probably stay as local desktop programs for a long time, but I'd bet that 80% of the stuff that requires a desktop application will eventually become available in some form on the web. Some stuff, probably never (AutoCad, video and sound editing apps, etc).
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I am a big fan of Linux in technical terms, but not a big fan in terms of UX (basically, the social end of computing, where collaboration across large teams is basically required for a high quality product).
Android is illustrative of what Linux *can* be, but on the desktop has never managed to be because of the obvious differences between the social (i.e. people and hierarchy) infrastructure behind Android vs. behind the Linux desktop.
I used Linux from 1993 through 2010. Early on I used the same .twmrc files with TWM that I used on my HPUX and SunOS boxes at CS school. At the time, the Linux desktop was *light years* ahead of the Windows desktop. 16-bit color, high resolutions, fast, lots of very powerful applications from the Unix world and experimental desktop projects like InterViews that seemed very promising. People with MS-DOS or GEM or Windows 1/2.x computers were envious.
Later on I used FVWM. Then I switched to KDE in the KDE Beta 3 era. But then (mid-late '90s), Linux on the desktop had already been outrun by Windows 95 and Mac OS. The level of integration amongst services and components wasn't that of a coherent system like it was for Mac OS and Windows; the Linux "computing is a network" philosophy—very good for things like business and scientific computing—was obvious in comparison.
When KDE 4 was released, I tried to use it for a while but it got in my way. I had to rebuild my entire desktop over and over again as objects were lost, lost their properties, etc. After about two weeks on KDE 4 during which I mostly nursed KDE along rather than doing my actual work, I switched to GNOME 2.x. I see that as something of a golden age for desktop Linux—basic parity with what was going on in the Mac and Windows worlds if you used a polished distribution like Fedora. Install was different, equally demanding of skills, but the actual install and setup process for the desktop OS on a bare machine involved approximately the same amount of work as was true for Windows, and the result was basic feature and experience parity.
Then, the bottom fell out. I suspect that a lot of the need for the Linux desktop with experience parity to Windows was met by an increasingly revived Mac OS, and users flocked there. Myself included, in the end.
GNOME 3 came out and KDE 4 was finally becoming usable and there was something of a battle, but both were behind the curve relative to the stability and seamlessness of OS X, and OS X had end-user application developers already. They screamed and moaned during the transition from legacy Mac OS, but most of them hung on and redeveloped their applications for OS X, and there were a bunch of new application developers to boot.
On top of that, the major applications of the business and academic worlds made their way out for OS X as it became a viable platform. You now had a seamless desktop OS that offered all the big brands in user applications, plus stability, plus easy access to a *nix environment and command line if you wanted it.
I was busy fighting Linux during that "instability era" just as KDE4/GNOME3 happened and duked it out. Things were changing very quickly in many facets of the Linux base installs, in hardware, etc. and every update seemed to break my Thinkpad T60 which at the time ran on Fedora. I was spending a lot of time fixing dotfiles and scripts and trying to solve dependency problems, etc. Meanwhile, lots of new things that were starting to become commonplace needs (cloud services, mobile devices, etc.) didn't yet work well with Linux without lots of command line hacking and compiling of alpha-quality stuff from source.
A couple of fellow academics kept telling me to try Mac OS. Finally I did, I installed a hackintosh partition on my T60. By mid-2010, I realized that I was using my OS X boot, along with the GNU tools environment from MacPorts, far more than I was using the Linux partition, and that there were Mac applications that I was *dying* to start using on a daily basis, but ha
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The height of Linux usability and parity was Red Hat 6 through Red Hat 9. Those were the pinnace of Linux operating systems in terms of comparability to and competitiveness with other contemporary systems.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I switched to Kubuntu in April on my main laptop. I am running 16.04 and it works great. I have not found anything I cannot do. I switched after I realized that Microsoft had renamed and re-enabled the telemetry service with a forced automatic update. You can put up with that kind of control from Redmond if you like but I will have none of it.
I keep a VMWare Player VM of Windows 7 around just in case but have not fired it up in a good while.
I am also a gamer and I have about 140 games in my steam account that work on Linux and for those that don't I stream them from my Windows 7 media center PC. I have not gotten rid of MS entirely but at least finally there are real transition solutions available.
The thing I would like to see is the tech class to wake up and throw off the yoke of Redmond and go ahead and switch at this point. A truly open OS with real competition between distros is the only solution to corporations trying to take over your computing experience for their benefit. I think if my fellow techies realized that we could start a real step change on the desktop. That would result in better support for Linux overall (drivers and apps) . The Linux Desktop OS is ready as near as I can tell. Just the people who aren't.
Yes - (www.imagemagick.org) - batch processing instead of doing the same thing over and over to many images.
It runs on several platforms.
I've used it a lot in situations such as where someone has scanned hundreds of text documents at maximum resolution and people are complaining that they take a long time to load.
Linux is not a Unix. The proper term is "Unix-like". Same for QNX and some others. Unix-like OSes are not "based" on Unix, they do not share source with Unix. They do have a compatible API though. And that is really the success-story here: The Unix kernel API (and the GNU tools that use it). Lean and mean without the bloat and > 1000 API calls (most redundant) that the Windows kernel comes with.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If you were to bother to read my years of ranting against Microsoft and their complete neglect of developers you will be surprised by my next line. Windows 10 is pretty damn good, and Visual Studio kicks everyone else's asses. I have seen Windows 10 running well on machines that aren't a whole lot better than a raspberry pi, and Visual Studio has stopped being a vehicle to get me to force my customers into the arms of Microsoft by forcing MSSQL and sharepoint type crap down their throats.
.net though.
It is like someone at MS woke up and said, "Hey maybe we should listen to our customers and stop focusing entirely on all this enterprise crap. Also maybe the developers out there are influencers vs a blip on the percentage radar. That said, I am still going to develop for linux as my primary server environment, but I can now do that from Visual Source safe. I can use git, I can use github, I can use gdb, and python.
I fully intend on using linux on robots and just about anywhere embedded, but my desktop is looking like I may very well return to Windows.
Most developers that I know are all saying roughly the same thing; developers who have usually apple and sometimes linux desktops.
I, for one, did not see this coming.
I still would rather eat shit than use