Gary Gatten <ggat...@waddell.com>, 2011-07-18 21:44 (+0200): > 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.
I'm not sure what you mean by "fast" here. It took a few years, at least. I think most of the initial users of Linux were frustrated Minix users and then MS-DOS users who would otherwise had gone to Minix. I bet most of them didn't know about any alternatives. I, for one, certainly didn't know about 386BSD when it was released in 1992. By then I was using SunOS (not Solaris!) on a Sun 3/60 at home and was no stranger to BSD, but still didn't know anything about the 386BSD efforts. I first met Linux systems at work in 1995. Several developers dual booted it on their standard issue PCs to get a better X terminal than the crappy proprietary X server on Windows 3.11 the company had bought. I was one of the lucky ones with a real NCD X terminal so I didn't even have a PC in my office. > 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. AFAIK BSD had a tremendous impact on 'servers' [1] and was much used, especially in academical settings. >>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. Weeks to compile!? How slow *is* your computer? *grin* Seriously, I think you have stumbled on a well known problem called All the World's a Linux Syndrome [2]. Many software developers develop for Linux and only for Linux. They don't know much about portability. [1] It seems a bit silly to call VAXen and PDP-11s with character terminals 'servers', but you know what I mean. [2] Previously "All the World's a VAX Syndrome". -- http://hack.org/mc/ Use plain text e-mail, please. OpenPGP welcome, 0xE4C92FA5. _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
