On 07/18/2011 01:32 PM, Paul Schmehl wrote:
--On July 18, 2011 2:44:15 PM -0500 Gary Gatten <ggat...@waddell.com>
wrote:
<snip>
I've always been curious why "Linux" seemed to take off so fast when
other FOSS / non Winblow$ OS's were available for some time with not
much
traction; OS/2, BeOS, *nix with X11, etc.
Not just on the desktop, but servers as well. "Supported" versions of
Linux such as RHEL, Suse, etc. seem to have made more headway into the
enterprise computing environment in the last ten years than *BSD did in
the last 30.
From my personal experience - which is relatively limited - it seems
applications just work on Linux? When I need to compile an app, it
takes a few mins on Linux - but may take me a few weeks on FBSD.
Granted someone more knowledgeable with FBSD, Compilers, etc. could do
it much faster than I.
Anyway, if someone has a brief explanation of why Linux has apparently
triumphed (in so far as installed base, desktop penetration, etc.) where
so many others have failed (including IBM with OS/2) I'd be
interested in
hearing those thoughts.
I'll hazard a guess. Linux was new and shiny and all the rage when
computer science really took off in the higher ed field. So geeks
wanted to use it, but to do so at that time you had to be a bit of a
coder. So the number of people hacking on it and submitting changes
ballooned. Basically, anyone who wanted to submit a change could, but
Linux kept the base kernel code management to prevent major mistakes.
Then all their friends wanted it too, but they couldn't code. So the
push for ease of use began. That was the genesis of projects such as
kde and gnome and the drive behind getting things like flash and
"cutting edge" drivers working in Linux.
Meanwhile, the *BSDs were those "old" "stogdy" OSes that "nobody" was
using any more, so there was no great incentive for geeks to check it
out and use it. Remember the old saw, "Unix is user friendly. It's
just picky about who its friends are."?
So Linux was becoming more "user friendly" and gaining all sorts of
GUI crud that made it easier for non-geeks to be "admins" while the
BSDs were still rolling down the tried and true path of development
that required that you actually understand the innards if you really
wanted to be an admin.
Linux hasn't "triumphed", BTW, it's merely in ascendancy right now.
It could well go by the wayside if a major problem erupts and doesn't
get resolved quickly.
In short, some people chase the newest shiniest thing. Others prefer
to stick with what works. Often, the newest shiniest folks, after
they've gained some wisdom, move to the other camp. So you could well
see a resurgence of BSD as Linux admins who've grown tired of its
quirks but have gained some unix skills start moving back toward the
BSD side.
This isn't a guess. Back in the olden days of 1991, in the days was
386BSD was a glimmer of articles in Dr Dobbs I and a lot of other *IX
enthusiasts dutifully compiled what was given us. Among us there was a
young Finnish student who want to contribute... And wasn't allowed. SO
he went on to create this new thing that accepted contributions from
anyone just so the code hung together. He called it Linux as a sort of
pun on the then prevelent training system called MINIX. Because it
accept contributions from anyone who could code or test, it gained
enormous popularity. It wasn't exclusive.
*BSD to this day still suffers from it's exclusive attitude to this very
day. You can find the attitude in it's developers as evidenced by
fairly recent posting from lead developers says (or words to this
effect) BSD is for developers and we don't care what the desktop users want.
This isn't intended as a flame, just a historical recounting. If you
want to know what's wrong (and in my opinion Lennert is every bit as
wrong in the same exact way) look inward.
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