Funny how he made it basically for his desktop computer.
33 years ago, and Linux is dominating in every part of the OS world except … the desktop.
(I’m paraphrasing his quote – he said something like this years ago, can’t find it, though.)
I would argue that it does dominate the desktop now as well, just not by usage numbers.
If I was told I had to use a windows desktop these days at home I think I’d start investing in a very large book collection.
Without a distro to rally behind I’m personally somewhat skeptical. Ubuntu was the best shot we had but since switching everything over to SNAPs it’s on the slow side. With the number of Windows ads and early end of support for Windows 10 there’s a real opportunity for desktop Linux, but until there’s a well supported distro that genuinely doesn’t require using the terminal I can’t see there being mass adoption.
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Any distro that ships KDE/Plasma as its default desktop should do the trick. I’m not personally using it right now but I hear OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is kicking a lot of rear end lately.
When I used TW few years ago it kicked every ass too.
It’s not about the distro. Most distros out right now are pretty good. What you need is hardware that lots of people want to buy with Linux installed on it as the default choice. Normal people don’t want to install any OS, be it Linux, Windows, MacOS or BSD. Whatever comes by default, it’s good.
I’m pretty sure that right now the most popular Linux distros are ChromeOS and SteamOS. I wonder why
My grandmother ran Linux for a couple decades until her death at 101 years old. My 80+ year old mom has been running Linux for at least 2 decades. Yes, I’m tech support, but I don’t really have to do anything. It just works.
And I’m cracking up at the scammers phoning up my 85 year old father telling him his Windows has been compromised on his Linux desktop.
You have to use a Windows desktop at home.
Sincerely,
Barnes & Noble
You might be thinking of this:
https://youtu.be/ZPUk1yNVeEI?feature=shared
Where he mentioned that the desktop is unique in that it has to support thousands of different devices for all kinds of people, and that most people don’t really care what their computer is running as long as it works.
Well, I was thinking of a quote that was much more similar to what I wrote (and it’s not in the video you linked).
I had such a trouble finding it that I’m starting to feel like it might be one of those “quotes” where the credited author never really said that, but I haven’t completely given up :D
Here’s one closer to what I paraphrased (but not quite it)–quoting an article from cio.com
While Linux pretty much dominates almost every walk of our lives, even on the consumer devices like smartphones and smart TVs, it has not had the same success on the desktop. What does Torvalds think about it? Is Linux a failure on the desktop? Not really. “The desktop hasn’t really taken over the world like Linux has in many other areas, but just looking at my own use, my desktop looks so much better than I ever could have imagined. Despite the fact that I’m known for sometimes not being very polite to some of the desktop UI people, because I want to get my work done. Pretty is not my primary thing. I actually am very happy with the Linux desktop, and I started the project for my own needs, and my needs are very much fulfilled. That’s why, to me, it’s not a failure. I would obviously love for Linux to take over that world too, but it turns out it’s a really hard area to enter. I’m still working on it. It’s been 25 years. I can do this for another 25. I’ll wear them down.”
There’s no guessing what will catch the world by storm. At a party once, Bram Cohen tried to get me interested in his ideas for a a peer-to-peer protocol, and I thought nothing of it.
My cousin’s buddies asked him to build the website for their new ride hailing app but he didn’t feel like doing some rinky dink thing, apparently Travis and them took it in stride though.
(just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu)
Aged like fine milk. Looking at you, GNU Hurd.
GNU Hurd didn’t take a good path of development following MACH design. But I still think GNU Hurd is the kernel of the future. Probably the Next generation Hurd. Just because GNU MACH and Hurd present very convoluted designs.
A kernel that performs most of their activities in user space and that it is truly modular looks very promising for the kind of systems we have nowadays and in the future.
Someone has to make the change, or we will stagnate in cumbersome and up featured systems.
not really, gnu is still a big professional project
GNU, or as I’d like to call it, GNU+PTerry
GNU is older than Linux? Neat.
Yeah. And I like how even from the message it shows that it’s been already well recognized by then.
If I recall correctly from some RMS’ talks I’ve seen many years ago, they’ve been working on it for years before, it’s just the kernel that was missing. As I see it, GNU and Linux was the breakthrough for FLOSS, since at that time you would still have to use a proprietary kernel. (Well, there’s GNU Hurd, but I’m not sure if it existed at that time, and even if it did, it was not ready.)
Yeah… but it was just RMS yelling at people from a street corner, nobody actually used it until Linux came along ;-)
I’m pretty sure Apple and Google already rewritten all important GNU parts into something with Apache or BSD license, to throw everything GPL licensed out of their embedded systems. The biggest and most important part was obviously GCC, replaced by Clang.
How many GPL-licensed system libraries and tools are in Android right now, except for the kernel? I’m pretty sure the answer is zero.
Yeah, gotta’ love how all the Apple fanboys were like Bash? Meh’ zsh is the superior shell in the span of a day.
I mean was the GPL viral… yeah probably. But it’s not like the courts came after either of them. Or ever really will in a meaningful way. Although hope springs eternal for non-webkit browsers in the not-EU 😌
What’s wrong with ZSH? I was using it for 5+ years before it became the default over bash, mainly because of the auto complete features, oh-my-zsh and later just plugins and powerlevel10k.
I think they’re referring to the fact that bash is GPL while ZSH is licensed permissively
Got it
Oh I didn’t think there’s anything wrong with it, I love oh-my-zsh. But it did feel like a bit of a cannery in the coal mine scenario when they elevated it the default and said they would phase out bash because of the GPL license.
I gotcha, I misunderstood. Cheers!
Bash is still in MacOS.
Clang and the LLVM with BSD like licences so we can get the 80’s suing experience of UNIX yet again.
It’s impressive how many people in the FOSS community hate GNU. Even to the point of creating OSes without GNU in it. Working for free for companies just to get their contributions stolen or expunged.
Apple loves Open Source, they can stole it as they like, like they did with Darwin (a derivation of XNU). Everything is open until we no longer want to, and you don’t have any right to desist such actions. This sounds like a dream for them.
Google loves Open Source, they can build an spyware, ad vending machine, DRM platform that is hosted in almost any IOT machine. This is Android.
The community has to realize that if you care about your software you have to ENFORCE the freedom of it.
The are entire projects just to liberate android from google. That’s is all fault of the open source licence.
There are quite a lot of projects which exist to liberate software projects that have been taken hostage. This is no sense.
Most of the IOT devices are presenting paywall features thanks to Android: cars, fridges, TVs, etc. What is next?
XNU is the kernel in Darwin, XNU is an Apple product derived from BSD and Mach. Darwin has a lot of FreeBSD in it.
Apple shares that code though. It’s on GitHub. There used to be Darwin distributions.
Your Android example doesn’t make very much sense either. The largest Android issues are typically hardware lockdown. Nothing about the GPL prevents someone building an ad platform that spies on you, it just makes them share the source code for it. Google’s licensing choices means they don’t share the source code for the Google pieces they put on top of AOSP, the entire project means people can build the alternatives though.
The lawsuits were about AT&Ts proprietary license. BSD and similar licenses are not that.
BSD licence allowed to work with the AT&T licence which at the end generated all the drama. Unix wars.
Again BSD is great if you don’t care about what will happen with your code.
Yeah the Android point doesn’t have any sense, that’s right.
Apple shares the code of the parts they want. Since it’s not a copyleft licence, then they can still ship you a version of Darwin + privative code as your macOs without sharing the entire code. So you end running kind of Frankenstein program with parts you don’t know what they do.
AOSP is not a great licence because it allows Google benefit from contributions, but then it has tons of privative software on top. So basically contributing to the AOSP means that you improve the code that later it’s used in combination with privative one.
My point is that libre source code should enforce that derivations of it stay libre. Otherwise you are working for free for companies that don’t care about the users.
Hey for companies is a good point. The best system for them is open source. It makes sense for them to use it. And open source is much better than just privative.
From the point of view of the individual user and developer is not that great. It kind of hooks you in because it has open source parts, but you are probably unaware of all the closed source stuff that runs in combination with it.
I get the open source point, but I don’t find it fair at the long term for the individual developer and user.
Over the years I’ve become convinced that the BSD license is great for code you don’t care about. I’ll use it myself. If there’s a library routine that I just want to say ‘hey, this is useful to anybody and I’m not going to maintain this,’ I’ll put it under the BSD license.
Linus Torvals at LinuxCon 2016
And an OS was born.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
I was just thinking today about how I want a tattoo along the lines of “even the ones with digital watches”, great timing!
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It was about as prescient as “640k is enough for everybody”, but in a good way.
People back then just grossly underestimated how big computing was going to be.
The human brain is not built to predict exponential growths!
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If you except Google co-opting Linux to create the most terrible dystopian mobile surveillance platform ever to come this close to 1984, Microsoft co-opting it to pretend they like open-source and broaden the reach of their closed-source crap, and sonsabitches like Redhat, amazingly it mostly still is.
Uh, Android is the alternative to Apple’s iOS. Android is much more customizable.
Which is kinda sad in its own way.
Think Different™ (But in the exact same way)
Think Different™ (Because we deprecated the service you liked and depended on because an internal team was jockeying for a higher position and rewrote what you loved but worse, so actually you are thinking different every year!)
If you don’t like what they are doing with Linux, because it is free and open source, participate in people that are using it in ways that you do like that they do it, or do it yourself.
There is nothing stopping you
Azure don’t give a shit what it runs. Windows is on its own these days; if they succeed, good for them, but honestly I think the days of Microsoft just pretending to give a shit about Linux are long gone; it’s an important OS to them too.
I’ve worked for Microsoft for 12 years, still have lots of friends there so I get some of the vibe from that.
Friends don’t let friends use windows man. :p
That’s what he said
Putting Red hat in the same group as Google and Microsoft is wild.
That’s because Red hat recently started doing some Microsoft and Google like shit.
While Microsoft and Google merely pretend to like open source but transparently hate it, it is (was) not quite as obvious that red hat wanted to capture the enterprise Linux market wholesale. What red hat has done is terrible for the ecosystem, much more so than Microsoft just throwing out worthless tokens of appreciation.
You people are hilarious. Red Hat provides more GPL code than any company I can think of. Half of what people call GNU has Red Hat as the largest contributor.
Feels before reals.
It’s not that far fetched, Google used to have somehow the same philosophy as current IBM-RedHat.
He was 22 years old. Pretty incredible.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
That post changed my life, gave me a great hobby, which became a career, and still puts food on the table for me and my family to this day. Thank you, Linus.
I for one really appreciate the effort of supporting non-AT drives despite the initial skepticism.
I’m glad someone was able to donate a non-AT drive because Linus could not afford it :-(
Happy Birthday!
Truly humble beginnings.
Ehh, it’ll never take off.
that’s all I have :-(
aww
We should make a donation campaign, pretty sure somebody has a spare SATA drive around. This minix clone sounds good
A few years ago there was a fantastic video detailing thorvald’s PC and it is a beast, crazy how far we’ve come
I remember him saying his gpu was “just some random rx580” which was a current GPU at the time.
Poor Linus :c
“Just a hobby, won’t be big” - he really didn’t think it will be one of the most sought after projects.
“We will be in and out, 10 minutes”
Or wanted to appear non-threatening
