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Linux Turns 27 (omgubuntu.co.uk)
It's been 27 years since Linus Torvalds let a group of people know about his "hobby" OS. OMGUbuntu blog writes: Did you know that Linux, like Queen Elizabeth II, actually has two birthdays? Some FOSS fans consider the first public release of (prototype) code, which dropped on October 5, 1991, as more worthy of being the kernel's true anniversary date. Others, ourselves included, take today, August 25, as the "birth" date of the project. And for good reason. This is the day on which, back in 1991, a young Finnish college student named Linus Torvalds sat at his desk to let the folks on comp.os.minix newsgroup know about the "hobby" OS he was working on. The "hobby OS" that wouldn't, he cautioned, be anything "big" or "professional." Even as Linux continues to have lion's share in the enterprise world, it has only managed to capture a tiny fraction of the consumer space. Further reading: Ask Slashdot: Whatever Happened To the 'Year of Linux on Desktop'?
Which Linux-based distro do you use? What changes, if any, would you like to see in it in the next three years?
Which Linux-based distro do you use? What changes, if any, would you like to see in it in the next three years?
Linux the kernel.
You know, the kernel in all those android phones and tablets.
Quite frankly Linux is in most smart phones and tablets, and is the most popular phone os kernel of all time.
Therefore itâ(TM)s incredibly popular and successful in the consumer market.
Improvement of battery life on laptops would be nice. I'm planning to work on that myself but I have three other projects I need to get through first, so it might take a few years before I get around to it. Hopefully someone else will have done it by then.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
... if you forget about Android.
For the win!
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
Gentoo. systemd-free by default, but to prevent any dependencies from sneaking it in:
/etc/portage/make.conf
echo sys-apps/systemd >>/etc/portage/package.mask
echo sys-fs/udev >>/etc/portage/package.mask
sed -i '/^USE=/s/"$/ -systemd"/'
Wouldn't that mean it was discontinued? If a manufacturer drops a product, that means they no longer make it. That is the opposite of what happened on 5 October 1991.
No need for anything else, really, as the systemd crap is replaced with a sane alternative.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You really need new fantasies. Ever heard of pussy?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I still say it was a ploy by Redhat to bring in more support money. Here install this massive monstrosity that hasn't been tested and does many extraneous things a startup manager should never worry about. Trust us it will work fine. What is the reason for systemd having a caching DNS server?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
1. A return of hardened gentoo and grsecurity's compliance with the GPL
2. A proper audit of the kernel and critical components to eliminate defects
3. A formal analysis of SELinux along the lines of SEL4
4. 7N reliability
5. Proper funding of RTLinux and further integration into mainstream
6. VST and malloc replacement Hoard as part of a standard Linux distro
7. Third-party maintenance of abandoned architectures
8. Rewrites of XTank, NV and PHIGS
9. Ports of Elite: Dangerous and Cubase
A. Hewlett-Packard's pluggable scheduler
B. Kernel config supporting hardware detection for suggesting defaults
C. Usable Gnome and KDE
D. Replace Systemd with something not made by committee
E. Addition of Occam-Pi/Guppy, Verified C and SystemC to LLVM
F. Harness for loading Linux modules onto alternate physical devices
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I started with FC3. Still running Fedora at home. Amazing.
FTR, my first distro was Yggdrasil, followed quickly by Slackware cause they had an easier method for bring in the Adaptec SCSI card.
For Desktop, I'm currently running Linux Mint which is pretty damned solid and stable and I've installed it on several family members during the Windows 7->8 fiasco and they're all still really, really happy with it.
What I would like to see Linux Desktop(TM) focus on is overall greater consistency! Starting with sound, all the way through the most basic stuff, the wide plethora of desktops (KDE, Gnome, etc.) and applications is a bloody mess of inconsistency. Having lived through "The UNIX wars", I can tell you that MS' *CONSISTENCY* in everything the user did - along with enabling developers of applications to have a single target platform - led to MS being what it is today. Choice is great, until you're paralysed by the plethora of choices and wind up with a tiny market.
PS - I could give a bubbly-fart about systemd. All I (as a user) care about is: Does this shit work?
1992... my junior year of college... remember running with boot / root disks (5 1/4 floppies, 1.2MB?)... on my shiny new 486. Used it for hacking up some text processing scripts for my information retrieval course, using awk and grep. And for a bit of C coding I seem to recall. Yeah, data structures / algorithms were probably the most important learnings in my CS education, but bumping into Linux was very fortunate and that foundation has served me well. Ha, but now my job consists mostly of getting developers off servers and onto serverless solutions.
My thoughts exactly. Make it complex, behaving arbitrarily, reduce diagnostics possibilities (binary logging) etc. and many enterprise system administrators will just have their bosses pay for support instead of wading through the mess themselves.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Which Linux-based distro do you use? What changes, if any, would you like to see in it in the next three years?
I'm a Debian user from a million years ago who regrettably turned to the dark side of Windows as my career pulled me deeper and deeper into the abyss. Last year I cracked and switched back to Linux. I discovered and quickly fell in love with Arch, and I really identified with the Arch principles. I came to realize I may be at odds though on their versatility principle, which as I understood represented choice. This seems to apply to a number of things, but not their init system which I have had some notable frustration with. I'm sure systemd has its merits, but the next system I'm building is going to be Artix+Runit based. Not just because it is systemd free, but I'm encouraged that this seems to be a group which believes more strongly in versatility, and that is a big part of why I came crawling back to Linux. Rather than ask what my distro can do for me next, I can only hope that I can get my skills up again to be able to ask what I can do for my distro.
You have to fucking nuts to think Linux hasn't taken off. It's in everything from Chromebooks and routers to your TV and car and near everything else.
Wikipedia says 16.36% of page requests are Linux. What do you make of that?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I am as mistrustful of systemd and the number of services that have come under the control of that project as anyone else, but I have not found stability to an issue. This is with long term operation of multiple Linux machines, server, desktop and laptop. For servers, I remove network manager, but that is pretty easy.
If you are going to trash systemd, and there certainly are reasons to be critical, please stick to the facts.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I no longer have the ability or the enthusiasm to spend hours troubleshooting errors and that seems to be all too common on GNU/Linux.
I spend approximately 0% of my time troubleshooting errors in Linux, or more precisely Debian Linux. This has been the case since well before 2011. So... what's the difference between you and me?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Rubbish. I don't use Ubuntu personally, but a lot of good has come from Ubuntu, including introducing Linux to tens of millions of desktop users. They do some stupid things, but everybody does. Without Ubuntu, Debian would not be as solid and vibrant as it is now.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Stick to the facts scrupulously and exactly, like the pro-systemd faction you mean? Also, that you have not found stability issues does not imply others have the same experience.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Actually, _most_ of Debian works fine with sysIVinit at this time.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I'm guessing Nvidia card. I found that it causes the most issues, mostly because the drivers aren't great in any capacity or package.
There are more non-systemd choices now:
http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Linux_distributions_without_systemd
I have been using Antix for awhile, and I just installed Devuan on one of my machines with no problems.
Kids, when I was your age, I walked uphill in a snow storm 10 miles to download Slackware version 1 on my university's time share, then used Kermit to transfer it to about 25 floppies. It took about three hours. Then I walked uphill in a snowstorm 10 miles back home to install it one floppy at a time on my 486. I got it working and learned basic C programming, UNIX shell commands, EMACS, VI, networking, etc. than I would have learned taking some basic 101-level CS courses. Learning by doing is still the best way.
I started with RHL 5.2 - not RHEL 5.2, but Red Hat Linux 5.2, pre-RHEL and Fedora. I've used every RHL version and then about every other Fedora version until RHEL/WhiteBoxLinux/ScientificLinux/CentOS came out and continued on the EL path, using Fedora just for MythDora "appliance" DVR purposes. I've used Ubuntu here and there and am impressed. My most recent workstation at work is Ubuntu 18 LTS which was a breeze to setup. We're a strong RHEL shop for all things Linux, but I just got tired of fighting proprietary or limited support things on the Desktop and all the CentOS/Fedora work-arounds that only work for a few years (Google Chrome, Earth, to name a few).
Personally, I've been Windows-free since RHL9, and have only used Windows in VirtualBox/VMWare Workstation for very specific proprietary requirements where necessary (Quickbooks when I had my own personal business and my accountant had all the info for the reports I needed to produce - I tried with GnuCash, but at the end of the day I needed to be out billing and not trying to produce bills and financial records - that said, I've used GnuCash for my personal finances since my cold-turkey conversion with RHL9 when I removed Windows from all my personal devices).
What would I like to see in 3 years? More ham radio support. I hate having to run a Windows box just to program my radios and run fully-featured communication software. Better/full native Steam support and no need for Wine. That's about it, but I don't see either one coming to pass in 3 years.
If you read the page you linked, it says 15.01% is Android and the other 1.35% is all desktop and laptop Linuxes.
This space intentionally left blank
Oh yes, I read it. But now you're making a distinction between PC Linux and Mobile Linux, in what way is that meaningful? Either way, it is people using Linux instead of Microsoft.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Link please. And I am definitely not pro-systemd. I am, however, anti-hyperbole.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Right, "Volunteered to help update rms's website". Troll.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
http://iki.fi/teknohog/music/c...
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
The first Linux distro I used was MCC. Which was the first Linux distro.
I've since used SLS, Slackware, Gentoo, Red Hat, Fedora, Centos, RHEL, Scientific Linux, Rocks, Debian, SuSE, Ubintu, Kubuntu, Mint and Linux From Scratch. Montavista is not really a distro, but I've used that too.
Of these, I think Ubuntu had the best drivers and Gentoo the best build system. None are quite what I want, so I end up rebuilding most of the system anyway.
The lack of a Linux Desktop is chiefly down to OSDL botching up that particular effort by holding closed-door meetings with vendors and running projects that never really went anywhere.
By failing to work properly with vendors, we had no drivers. Without those, nothing else could happen.
(The difficulty of getting things in the kernel, leading to a lot of abandoned, led me to develop FOLK, which inspired other megapatchsets, which in turn eventually led to the development tree. I still fight hard for obscure but important projects to be better-known, as kernel progress hinges on people knowing what's out there. However, driver issues are due to paranoid, intransigent vendors.)
Microsoft likely blackmailed some vendors, a crime for which it should have been broken up. It should have been broken up in 1998 anyway.
But the lack of a decent video system (XFree suffered a political meltdown, and Berlin folded due to design problems) and audio issues (OSS was a mess, ALSA lacked features, PulseAudio ditto) meant vendors had no incentive to provide drivers. To them, Linux was expensive to support with no return.
Since then, Linux has churned a little. Reliability has dropped a little, as has performance. I don't buy it does more as I roll my own kernels so I know exactly what they should be doing.
They're still miles ahead of Windows, several decades ahead of BSD and some diagonal in the spacetime continuum ahead of the dozen or so other OS' I've used. But benchmarks increasingly put Windows ahead of Linux for database and webserver activity. That's... unthinkable. It certainly isn't tolerable.
If Linux doesn't regain the lead, it is going to be on shaky ground, whatever Linus thinks the kernel can do. At this point, and with so much more experience in the enterprise than Microsoft, Linux' developers should find the problems in the kernel and core system, fix them and work from there.
(That's why my wishlist, in another post, involves fixing infrastructure in Linux. That's essential for there to be a Linux.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Thanks to WSL* it is finally the year of the LINUX desktop!
Brought to you by your good friends at Microsoft.....
*Windows Subsystem for LINUX
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
"27 club"?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
What is this nonsense? Android is a conclusive nail in that coffin.
The Year of the Linux Desktop has gone the way of the desktop. Not many people are using them outside of work environments and even the work environments are changing. Most people don't need a desktop. They need a portable device that they can pretend to do work on that can maybe handle spreadsheets while watching YouTube. Failing that a device to play Angry Birds while engaged in the WC is sufficient for purpose for maybe 80% of the modern population.
Desktops are for developers... again.
As for what I use personally: it's Debian. I've got it on an overclocked dead badger among other things. I enjoy being able to check my emails while microwaving a hot pocket. I use Suse at work for preference but I also spend a lot of time with CentOS. First one I ever used was RedHat I think, I spent a lot of time drinking back then, so it's kind of blurry. For the future: if we can kill systemd with fire I'd be happy. I also miss Mandrake for reasons I can't quite define.
Good lord, it's been a while. Flashback (IIRC) to my first 0.93 install, on a PC with a screaming fast 80386 running at 12 mhz cpu, a meg of ram, and a massive 40 meg hard disk and a 2400 baud modem. I'm not sure I've ever felt a greater sense of accomplishment than seeing a HUGE "X" move around a grey screen the first time I got Xwindows running. That said? it's ages later, and I've had time to ponder. My grievances? I wish Linux had enforced common logging syntax similar to to the VAX/VMS logging system (component, severity, unique, and DOCUMENTED error number). X-Windows? Unnecessarily bloated. Yes, it was expedient at the time to port an existing windowing system, but that's been a bit of a boat anchor for Linux. I don't care that a windowing system is "network aware", that's the responsibility of individual applications. And systemd? an absurdly cumbersome solution to a problem that never existed. All in all? it's been a fun, frustrating, and rewarding experience. And tip of the hat to everyone in the community who has contributed in the past.
FTR, my first distro was Yggdrasil, followed quickly by Slackware cause they had an easier method for bring in the Adaptec SCSI card.
For Desktop, I'm currently running Linux Mint which is pretty damned solid and stable and I've installed it on several family members during the Windows 7->8 fiasco and they're all still really, really happy with it.
What I would like to see Linux Desktop(TM) focus on is overall greater consistency! Starting with sound, all the way through the most basic stuff, the wide plethora of desktops (KDE, Gnome, etc.) and applications is a bloody mess of inconsistency. Having lived through "The UNIX wars", I can tell you that MS' *CONSISTENCY* in everything the user did - along with enabling developers of applications to have a single target platform - led to MS being what it is today. Choice is great, until you're paralysed by the plethora of choices and wind up with a tiny market.
PS - I could give a bubbly-fart about systemd. All I (as a user) care about is: Does this shit work?
So ... what you really want is consistency the way YOU want it. Otherwise you would have just stuck with Windows 8 for your family.
You are given the ability to have what you want with Linux, you are NOT with Microsoft. I think i know what you were getting at, and I think you would want some things to be standardize. But really, I don't mind some of the inconsistencies.. it lets me choose what I want. e.g. XFCE is my choice of DE... I wouldn't enjoy Linux as much with some other one, even though I can appreciate them. I do think there is a downside to standardization/consistency... lack of choice. I could never use a Mac because their UI makes NO sense to me.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Linux might be 27 years old today, but it's aged me 40.
"Link please???" The war-cry of the systemd-fanatic that requires all in opposition to prove everything and proves nothing himself? Seriously? How stupid do you think we are?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Chromebooks are designed to run web applications. Most cannot run applications designed for GNU/Linux without a firmware replacement because they use a version of the Linux kernel prior to the addition of features that allow for rich container support. See the recent Slashdot story "Linux Apps Are Not Coming To Many Still-Supported Chromebooks".
Comment removed based on user account deletion
But now you're making a distinction between PC Linux and Mobile Linux, in what way is that meaningful?
Mobile Linux is most commonly used for viewing works created by others, not for creating works longer than the one or two paragraphs of a Tweet or a Facebook post. This is in large part caused by the limits of a finger-operated input device for entering large amounts of text or indicating fine positions, combined with the hassle of carrying an external mouse and keyboard everywhere you go.
Mobile Linux cannot by default run applications designed for desktop or laptop computers. There exist apps called GNURoot Debian and XServer XSDL that reportedly do a passable job of simulating a desktop environment, but this adds a lot of overhead in CPU (therefore battery) and storage use.
Mobile Linux cannot run applications designed for Wine, even if the application's developer fully supports use in Wine. This is because Wine is designed for CPUs using the x86 or x86-64 instruction set, whereas mobile Linux devices have an ARM or ARM64 CPU.
Probably hardware differences. Debian's own wiki acknowledges plenty of problems getting Debian GNU/Linux to behave on, say, an ASUS Transformer Book T100TA.
It's not superior when I have to reboot the computer after every single dingy update. I do an X update and I need to reboot. This did not use to be the case.
Try Ubuntu.
Lol, fortunately that was a joke. And fortunately Linus still holds the reins. The kernel is highly demanding in terms of dedication, concentration, technical expertise and managing skills (like being able to be tough when necessary), and all these qualities incorporated into a single man is a pretty rare thing nowadays.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
All the way. The day I jumped off the FreeBSD boat and into Linux camp, I chose Debian. I've been with it ever since.
And personally? I like systemd. It does the job and I find it easier to work with than init scripts. And for those cases I still want to use init scripts, it lets me. Debugging daemon/service issues has never been easier than since systemd dropped. journalctl is great for diagnosing issues. I really don't understand the fuss over it.
When used to prevent the reporting of a crime, yes
When used in conjunction with a campaign, yes
When used in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy, yes.
All three are true of tRump's hush fund.
Wow I feed old now. Have installed, configured and used:
Slackware 96
RedHat
Gentoo (I did the Mom experiment - she used it for years)
Ubuntu
Debian/Raspbian
Special mention to cygwin for keeping me sane whenever I was forced to use Windows.
So what is a Chromebook, is it mobile or is it a PC? Fine distinctions. Does not change the fact that a large fraction of people are using Linux now, in a large segment of the market, where they would otherwise be using Microsoft.
What do people do most on their PCs these days? Browse. What do people do with a major amount of time on their phone? Browse.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
"Link please???" The war-cry of the systemd-fanatic
You sound like an ass at the moment. I specifically said that I am not pro systemd, far from it. Now a link please, or you are a blowhard too.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
What do people do most on their PCs these days? Browse. What do people do with a major amount of time on their phone? Browse.
When you want to graduate from browsing to creating, it's easier to do so if you own a PC than if all you have is what The Register refers to as a "fondleslab."
Your post makes no sense.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Are you for real? The whole Android OS is open source.. Some drivers supplied by other companies are closed source binary blobs, but that's even the case in normal desktop Linux.
So... either you don't know what the fuck you are talking about, or you are lying on purpose. Which is it?
You really don't understand how any of this works do you? At any point in time you are welcome to fork the kernel.. You just don't get to call it Linux... Don't like that? Too fucking bad..
Copyright Law and Trademark Law are two different things..
Linus has already delegated large amounts of his responsibility to others.. But, you're too busy talking about shit you know nothing about...
I suppose you don't think Bill Gates was the final authority on Windows, at the end of the day? He may not have meddled but, as Chairman/CEO, I can guarantee you that if he did have something to say, it would have been implemented..
I use Fedora was my workstation, and I love it. There's little a user can't do with Fedora or Linux (outside of playing non Unity-based games; Valve's encouraged many more games to be cross-platform ultimately though).
What would I change? Whatever regression bugs have been added to and/or existed in GNOME 3. I prefer GNOME over other DEs aesthetically, but after two or more days, the performance of GNOME, especially on modal overlay drawings, is horrific. A reboot is required with Wayland (AFAIK).
This is something I'd never experience with Windows, and these sort of niggling bugs hold me back from pushing normies into Fedora land.
Named after botanist Leonhart Fuchs.
*turns on your Chromebook with Crouton*
*presses Space as prompted*
*presses Enter as prompted*
Now where's all your data? (explanation)
I non-subtly hinted that I am pretty sure you are lying. If you were not, you would be aware of all the fine web-pages that list and discuss the problems with systemd.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
When did a pro-systemd post ever made sense? These people cannot think.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Actually, asking for evidence and then, should it be provided, ignoring is is a tried-and-true propaganda technique and a favorite of some type of fanatic. Can be observed to be used all the time by the systemd-fanatics.
You are simply a disgusting liar. Incidentally, I do not want the systemd-fanatics to believe anything. They are free to be as stupid as they like, as long as it does not affect me.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You don't make any sense either. All those content-free posts, what is the point?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I started with Slackware in late 1996 on a scrapped machine with ESD drives. When 3Com came out with NICs that had MAC addresses unknown to the o.s., I jumped in with my trusty C compiler and added the network driver code necessary to let the new NICs work. That was fun!
I've also used Suse, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Knoppix, Andy's Ham Radio Linux, DSL, and a few other variants.
I sneaked Linux into the back door of a Fortune 100 company in the form of DNS servers. When I left many years later, the company had *hundreds* of Linux machines.
I am microsoft-free thanks to Ubuntu 16.04.
Changes: stomp to death network manager, systemd, and anything else that appears to be tainted by microsoft-like developers.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
Started with early Slackware, now Ubuntu LTS for servers and Mint (MATE) desktops.. It all just works! Still not totally convinced about systemd...
"Never underestimate the power of very stupid people in large groups" seen on someone's blog...