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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 had been using Linux from very early on. Although I had primarily worked with SunOS/Solaris and HP-UX systems, a fellow programmer introduced me to Yggdrasil Linux. I started using it full time, and eventually moved to Debian, which I used for nearly 20 years.
But today, Linux is pretty much dead to me. Systemd and GNOME 3, among other changes, have effectively ruined it for me. Nothing ruins a Linux user's experience more than having their system not boot fully due to some obscure, and usually stupid, problem involving systemd. The GNOME 3 desktop is, in my opinion, totally unusable. The other desktop environments aren't much better.
When I use Linux today, it feels more like I'm using Windows than it does I'm using a *nix-like system.
I know that I can use an archaic distro like Slackware, or an inconvenient one like Gentoo, or a hobbyist distro like Devuan. But none of those really meet my needs. All I really want is the Debian we had just a few years ago, right before the switch to systemd and GNOME 3: stable, reliable, trustworthy and fun to use.
After systemd prevented my Debian system from booting much too often, I switched to FreeBSD. It gives me everything Linux used to give me, but now it gives me so much more. Its excellent ZFS support is a game-changer. Its reliability is truly amazing. It performs very well. Most importantly, I trust its developers to do the right thing, and preserve the In hindsight, I wish I had switched to FreeBSD much earlier.
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.
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The first version of Linux I ever played around with was from a book with CDs about Slackware in 1997. Must have been an old version as it never worked with my Socket 7 motherboard with an AMD K5 processor. Back then it was compile and pray to get anything working. I later ran SuSE 5 through 10. Switched to Ubuntu for a while. Fedora and Mint are my favorite distros for work. These days I use Red Hat at home in case I ever get a job that required Red Hat experience.
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.