Linux is 20!

[shenley]

Recently, Jim Zemlin, director of the Linux Foundation acknowledged it is 20 years since Linus Torvalds began development of the Linux kernel. This month marks the 20th birthday of Linux. Personally, I feel the official 20th birthday should be 25th August, after all is was that day in 1991, that Torvalds made his famous Usenet posting to the newsgroup "comp.os.minix." Still Zemlin says it is this month, so who am I to argue.

I've been using Linux professionally since 1996 and for me it has been an interesting 15 years. Today Linux is a very mature product. Some things have been lost over the years, which I miss. These include :

• the challenge of old-school Linux. . In the early days, installing Linux gave users a real sense of satisfaction. I love how easy Linux is to install today,and this helps it to spread. However there was something to be said for overcoming the challenges presented by Linux in the early days. It was a badge of honour only a select few could wear.
• the old sound test; you would hear Linus Torvalds say: "Hello. This is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux, Linux." Much more welcoming than the now typical bing, bong, boing. This is far too much like Windows.
• the seeming infinite number of distributions. In the early days, new, obscure distributions were popping up daily. What happened to Yggdrasil, Lycoris, Jurix, SPIRO, etc, etc?
• the speed. KDE and Gnome are becoming very bloated, in the same manor Windows is. Compare the size and speed of 3.11 to Windows 7; ditto KDE3 vs KDE4. The new WIMPs look prettier but really they do nothing different to the old UIs

Here's to the next 20 years!

[CyberNerd]

and FTP is 40 !

FTP is 40 years old | bit-tech.net

the speed. KDE and Gnome are becoming very bloated, in the same manor Windows is. Compare the size and speed of 3.11 to Windows 7; ditto KDE3 vs KDE4. The new WIMPs look prettier but really they do nothing different to the old UIs

?? You can still run a modern linux distro on a laptop that XP struggles with!

[unixman]

Here is a nice article from LinuxUser & Developer on the early days of Linux - Click Me. I especially like Dave Miller's admission.

[jinnantonnixx]

Back in '91(ish) I must have had one of the first Linux disks. An ubergeek friend gave me a disk at uni. It was a 1.4 MB floppy, when booted (using LILO) gave you a console. Even at that stage you could use ALT and the 'F' keys to get several sessions going. It didn't do much else, as there was no software, just an OS. I still remember it running on my trusty Osbourne SX-20... 'LI-' appeared, then a few seconds later 'LO'. Sigh....

[zippo]

Sorry - I started to get all excited ... must have misread the theard header ... I thought it read "Linux sells 20 copies" Damm I thought - at last the writing is on the wall for Microsoft ........