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How Open Source Advocates Celebrated The 26th Anniversary of Linux (linux.com)
To celebrate Linux's 26th anniversary, the Linux Foundation tweeted a picture of Tux on a birthday cake, and linked to an essay on OpenSource.com by FreeDOS founder Jim Hall:
My first Linux distribution was Softlanding Linux System (SLS) 1.03, with Linux kernel 0.99 alpha patch level 11. That required a whopping 2MB of RAM, or 4MB if you wanted to compile programs, and 8MB to run X windows... To celebrate, I reinstalled SLS 1.05 to remind myself what the Linux 1.0 kernel was like and to recognize how far Linux has come since the 1990s.
"Getting X windows to perform was not exactly easy..." Hall writes, adding "the concept of a desktop didn't exist yet." Meanwhile Phoronix celebrated by republishing that fateful email Linus Torvalds sent on August 25, 1991. And Fossbytes shared the most recent statistics about modern-day Linux's 20 million lines of code from the Linux Foundation: During the period between the 3.19 and 4.7 releases, the kernel community was merging changes at an average rate of 7.8 patches per hour; that is a slight increase from the 7.71 patches per hour seen in the previous version of this report, and a continuation of the longterm trend toward higher patch volumes.
"Getting X windows to perform was not exactly easy..." Hall writes, adding "the concept of a desktop didn't exist yet." Meanwhile Phoronix celebrated by republishing that fateful email Linus Torvalds sent on August 25, 1991. And Fossbytes shared the most recent statistics about modern-day Linux's 20 million lines of code from the Linux Foundation: During the period between the 3.19 and 4.7 releases, the kernel community was merging changes at an average rate of 7.8 patches per hour; that is a slight increase from the 7.71 patches per hour seen in the previous version of this report, and a continuation of the longterm trend toward higher patch volumes.
I've been at this long enough to remember when Linux and Open Source as a dev model where all but laughed at by industry as not and will never amount to anything. Fast forward to know and Linux runs on everything and the Open Source dev model rules the day. But does it run Linux? But what doesn't! I am satisfied that we have achieved "The day of Linux on the desk\laptop." Going back a few decades, I don't think most people suspected we would be surrounded by all manner of things running Linux.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Window managers (at least in those days) generally did not provide widget trays, launch menus, or other things you usually see on an empty modern-day computer desktop. They decorated each window with controls -- one or more resizing buttons, a frame on at least one side of the window, and usually a system menu -- and arranged icons for minimized applications. fvwm was notable for providing virtual workspaces.
On the other hand, the Common Desktop Environment (CDE, whence KDE got its name) was first released in 1993, so there was not just the concept of a desktop environment for X back then, but even a shipping implementation. CDE was not very nice to use -- where I was introduced to Linux in the mid-'90s, fvwm2 was much more popular -- but it is clearly recognizable as a predecessor to modern computer desktops.