Happy birthday 🎊🎉 GNU/Linux.
Today GNU/Linux is 32 years old.
It was thankfully released to the public on August 25th, 1991 by Linus Torvalds when he was only 21 years old student.
What a lovely journey 🤍
won’t be big and professional like gnu
that didn’t age well
And this:
and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks
I appreciate the absolute humility though
Sure it aged well. WAY WAY BIGGER than gnu.
Weight your words my friend! GNU’s a behemoth !
GCC alone is almost as big as Linux. Add core/binutils, the Hurd, … And you easily outclass the kernel itself !
~ $ du -sh linux-6.4.12/ gcc-13.2.0/ 1.5G linux-6.4.12/ 1.1G gcc-13.2.0/Oh, and Emacs.
Speaking as someone that doesn’t understand computers very well: is Hurd usable as a kernel nowadays?
Yes if you cherry pick the hardware :)
What is actually the point of using hurd other than being able to say you use Hurd though?
Maybe it hurds in a good way.
Nah, it’s a kernel it does kernel stuff and does not offer anything a normal user notices compared to other kernels.
It might be interesting for people who work on kernels just to see different ways on how to solve common problems.
afaik microkernels have a security advantage since kernel modules do not share the same address space as the main kernel or other modules
Possibly licensing reasons. Linux is GPLv2 only, Hurd seems to be GPLv2 or later, there could be reasons you may want to use something under the GPLv3.
Hurd is not a monolithic kernel, so it’s an interesting technical endeavor. It’s also a GNU package which means it’s guaranteed to stay libre.
Hurd is also a smaller project relative to linux without the many eyes of the Linux board members.
That’s debatable, since what people generally call “Linux” is more GNU than Linux anyway. “Linux” as the Linux fandom considers is it big and professional like GNU, because it is GNU (among other things).
But what about Linux distributions compiled without GNU tools? Most popular Linux distribution’s kernel currently is compiled with Clang, not GCC, and as far as I am aware does not include anything from GNU. Of course Linux is historically influenced by GNU, but in current day and age they are orthogonal
It doesn’t change the larger point that GNU is way bigger than Linux, though. There are a tonne of things that are larger than Linux, and GNU is one of them.
That is an entirely different argument which I did not contest and the comment I have answered to did not make
EDIT: Although, it depends on what we define as “bigger”. Binary size is certainly bigger, but user adoption is abysmal comparatively.
but user adoption is abysmal comparatively
I guess this is a matter of perspective. What I was saying in my previous comment is that what people commonly refer to as “Linux” (as in “Linux distributions”) is not just Linux (which is just a kernel) but also includes a bunch of other stuff, including GNU (that is what GNU/Linux refers to). If you’re talking about the actual thing called Linux, you’d be right, because most GNU systems are GNU/Linux systems, whereas arguably most Linux systems are not GNU systems; Alpine and Android are non-GNU Linux systems.
However, if like many in the Linux fandom you discount Android, then most Linux systems are GNU systems and vice-versa.
Why would I discount the most popular applications of the kernel? That is almost the whole userbase
Allow me to interject for a moment…
I mean the GPL allowed linux to become a commercial entity. And the whole “professional” outlook is because theres a ton of companies who contribute either funds or development to the project.
hi rms
It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.
Famous last words
*protable
Imagine making a typo and it continually being shared and highlighted for over 30 years.
Kinda makes me glad I’ll never be famous for anything.
TIL Linus B. Torvalds is anti-table
Well, Linux is 32 years old; GNU goes back to 1984, and Unix all the way back to 1970! The history of this OS is much older than Linus Torvalds’s involvement; he “only” created and maintains the most popular kernel.
But yes, happy birthday to Linux. Many thousands have contributed to making this operating system what it is today and they all have my utmost thanks for it.
It is a happy coincidence that the evening before the 1970s began, at 4pm Pacific, they decided to invent UNIX.
How so?
I think it’s a joke about how UNIX timestamps work. They count milliseconds from January 1st 1970, 00:00:00 UTC, which is 4pm the day before in PST. So the happy coincidence is that they invented UNIX at the very millisecond when its clock starts.
There, ruined the joke.
Oh right, the UNIX epoch actually starts when UNIX was invented
Somehow, I didn’t expect that…
The world didn’t exist before 1970.
My brain gets numb when I start thinking about all the branches that have come from Unix… and the branches from those branches and so on.
Are you sure unix will be created in the year 3.843063914 E+5636(1970!)
How would anything even survive 3.843063914 E+5636 years after the end of the universe to make unix
They misspoke: Hurd will be usable in year 1970!
No way Linux is 32! I remember when it first came out and it was just…oh.
Don’t mind me, I’ll just be here yelling at the cloud.
Sigh, my condolences. I’m shouting right beside you. I first learned about linux in 1993 in college. I got it working on a shiny new 486 with super vga graphics. We were allowed access to the college’s aix mainframes and thus the internet via a slip connection - but only through Unix like systems. Linux was amazing, I couldn’t believe we had x going, and loading up cad, matlab, maple, ftp, fsp, irc, nettrek, and everything else possible in the computer centers - but over a telephone line from our apartment.
Magical.
Funny how it really only became my daily driver three ish years ago - despite using it forever. Cuz games - glad that’s changed finally.
Most of the cloud runs Linux.
The Linus that was promised.
It’s a shame. Linus was and is far more deserving of respect for his contributions to technology than Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Probably even Woz. But he’s by far down the line in terms of fame and fortune. Except maybe Woz.
Watch some of the interviews in his home office. Dude is a happy dad with a nice family. Meanwhile a lot of tech billionaires are miserable. I’d say the respect he’s earned by not selling out is worth more than mainstream success. Linux and Linus are just the right size.
Fair point. Out of all the tech legends, Linus (and Woz) seem the happiest.
They seem to have their priorities in the right place, living a happy comfortable human life instead of trying to mimic the exploit-profit-control-infiniteGrowth-fullThrottle24/7 priorities of the companies they started/own/work for.
I have a feeling he’s more okay with having less fortune though. Just the impression I get about him.
I can’t imagine he’s struggling for money, he’s a smart guy and wrote an OS used in some capacity by so many corporations
He’s probably written books that sell quite well
“He oversees and has final say over every line of code [of Linux] to this day. The Linux Foundation pays Linus around $1.5 million per year to support the software.”
https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/linus-torvalds-net-worth/
He has an estimated net worth of $150 million.
https://www.linuxfordevices.com/tutorials/linux/linus-torvalds-net-worth
They meant gain wealth like apple founders or any other big tech. Believe he derives a salary from Linux foundation for his work. I don’t imagine that being anything comparable to owning large percentage of a tech company.
True but he’s also going to make more than enough to live comfortably I’m sure
Don’t need to be a billionaire to have a good comfortable life
Didn’t mean he wasnt earning well. Just clarified what the original comment meant.
What books has Linus written?
Google search found “Just for fun the story of an accidental revolutionary” by Linus torvalds as the first result
My point was more that there are absolutely ways he can make money off Linux’s success
If we are marking the birth of Linux and trying to call it GNU / Linux, we should remember our history.
Linux was not created with the intention of being part of the GNU project. In this very announcement, it says “not big and professional like GNU”. Taking away the adjectives, the important bit is “not GNU”. Parts of GNU turned out to be “big and professional”. Look at who contributes to GCC and Glibc for example. I would argue that the GNU kernel ( HURD ) is essentially a hobby project though ( not very “professional” ). The rest of GNU never really not that “big” either. My Linux distro offers me something like 80,000 packages and only a few hundred of them are associated with the GNU project.
What I wanted to point out here though is the license. Today, the Linux kernel is distributed via the GPL. This is the Free Software Foundation’s ( FSF ) General Public License—arguably the most important copyleft software license. Linux did not start out GPL though.
In fact, the early goals of the FSF and Linus were not totally aligned.
The FSF started the GNU project to create a POSIX system that provides Richard Stallman’s four freedoms and the GPL was conceived to enforce this. The “free” in FSF stands for freedom. In the early days, GNU was not free as in money as Richard Stallman did not care about that. Richard Stallman made money for the FSF by charging for distribution of GNU on tapes.
While Linus Torvalds as always been a proponent of Open Source, he has not always been a great advocate of “free software” in the FSF sense. The reason that Linus wrote Linux is because MINIX ( and UNIX of course ) cost money. When he says “free” in this announcement, he means money. When he started shipping Linux, he did not use the GPL. Perhaps the most important provision of the original Linux license was that you could NOT charge money for it. So we can see that Linus and RMS ( Richard Stallman ) had different goals.
In the early days, a “working” Linux system was certainly Linux + GNU ( see my reply elsewhere ). As there was no other “free” ( legally unencumbered ) UNIX-a-like, Linux became popular quickly. People started handing out Linux CDs at conferences and in universities ( this was pre-WWW remember ). The Linux license meant that you could not charge for these though and, back then, distributing CDs was not cheap. So being an enthusiastic Linux promoter was a financial commitment ( the opposite of “free” ).
People complained to Linus about this. Imposing financial hardship was the opposite of what he was trying to do. So, to resolve the situation, Linus switched the Linux kernel license to GPL.
The Linux kernel uses a modified GPL though. It is one that makes it more “open” ( as in Open Source ) but less “free” ( as in RMS / FSF ).
Switching to the GPL was certainly a great move for Linux. It exploded in popularity. When the web become a thing in the mid-90’s, Linux grew like wild fire and it dragged parts of the GNU project into the limelight wit it.
As a footnote, when Linus sent this announcement that he was working on Linux, BSD was already a thing. BSD was popular in academia and a version for the 386 ( the hardware Linus had ) had just been created. As BSD was more mature and more advanced, arguably it should have been BSD and not Linux that took over the world. BSD was free both in terms or money and freedom. It used the BSD license of course which is either more or less free than the GPL depending on which freedoms you value. Sadly, AT&T sued Berkeley ( the B in BSD ) to stop the “free”‘ distribution of BSD. Linux emerged as an alternative to BSD right at the moment that BSD was seen as legally risky. Soon, Linux was reaching audiences that had never heard of BSD. By the time the BSD lawsuit was settled, Linux was well on its way and had the momentum. BSD is still with us ( most purely as FreeBSD ) but it never caught up in terms of community size and / or commercial involvement.
If not for that AT&T lawsuit, there may have never been a Linux as we know it now and GNU would probably be much less popular as well.
Ironically, at the time that Linus wrote this announcement, BSD required GCC as well. Modern FreeBSD uses Clang / LLVM instead but this did not come around until many, many years later. The GNU project deserves its place in history and not just on Linux.
Can this be the new GNU/Linux copypasta?
The BSD license allows incorporation of BSD code in non-free projects. That was both an advantage for capitalists while simultaneously moving hobbyists away from it’s development. Kind of an important bit of info.
Something is open source or isn’t. There’s a set, binary definition.
I get the feeling you’re implying a difference/aversion between those two terms which doesn’t exist. This and the combination with a nonsensical statement about amount of GNU packages vs non-GNU packed makes it feel like you’re pushing an agenda here: There’s far more free software than just GNU’s - that’s a success for free software and the GNU project. There’s no connect between the argument you’re obviously implying.
Also HURD never took off - but why should it? The GNU project’s goal is a fully free operating system, with Linux being persuaded to adopt a proper license there’s no real need for HURD. It doesn’t mean it isn’t a fun project.Which two terms? Everyone has an agenda but I am not sure what I am being accused of here. Do you mean Free Software vs Open Source? The FSF goes to great lengths to distinguish between those two terms:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html
I am pretty sure my usage is consistent with the owners and creators of those terms. Have I made an error?
The error is in saying something is made “more open source”. The definition:
https://opensource.org/osd/
Does your license uphold these rules? It’s open source. Does it not? It isn’t.deleted by creator
That is not correct. Who is this “they” you are talking about? The OSI?
Open source is a term with a definition - which has been written by software freedom advocates by the way.
With free software you have politics and a philosophy, in which somebody can have more freedom or less with a piece of software. I really wouldn’t confuse that with the practicability of the OSI definition.
Copyleft or push-over is a whole separate topic. Copyleft might be favoured by software freedom enthusiasts, but I disagree with your idea of separation through that. Even if you don’t care about software freedom, you could like the practical effects of the AGPL.
I feel like you’re spreading at least misguiding information here.deleted by creator
These statements do not contradict anything I have said. Some people are pragmatic, some dogmatic about software freedom. So what?
Another correction since I am on a roll: Linux can’t switch from GPLv2. There are too many copyright holders, you’d never be able to contact all of them and get them to agree to a license change. Even if Linus Torvalds wanted to change, which I honestly don’t think would be a sensible thing to do in his position.
Open source is one thing but “free” is a lot of things.
sniffle They grow up so fast!
Posted via android.
It’s as if it was only yesterday that I watched him flip nvidia off.
Posted via arch.
He should do it again
Linus was so nice back then…
His soul still intact
This was before he discovered that Jenson was an aborted spawn of lucifer himself.
linus is still based as always though
he’s very open about his ideas and it’s great
Quoting from memory: “Remember the times when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?”
What are AT-harddisks? Google is not helpful.
Aka PATA or IDE hard disks. Basically consumer grade kit.
The statement that the kernel would only ever handle IDE was basically a confession that this would never be a product suitable for enterprise or professional use where SCSI was the typical interface.
To be fair, it’s actually not suitable for professional use. That’d be an understatement, it’s damn perfect for literally everything!
except running solidworks 🥲
Yet…
You had me in the first half, not gonna lie
I’m not quite sure, but maybe it refers to the IBM PC AT ( model 5170) hard drive?
I love GNU/Linux.
Before I used Debian, I’d constantly fight with my operating system. Every time I opened michaelsoft binbows(which would take ages to open), I’d make sure that simplewall is running, so that bill doesn’t get any more info, after every 180 days, I’d run MAS to renew my office 365. I’d manually sync time since windows would use that same domain to send telemetry.
Now everytime I turn on my computer, the swirl of Debian greets me in a flash, my i3 being ready even before I sit.
I can spend hours doing work without any mandatory updates . It is an operating system that never makes me feel its presence. For that I’m grateful to people like Ian, Stallman, Linus, among countless others making my life better.
I can spend hours doing work without any mandatory updates .
Weird way to say spend hours fixing something that just randomly borked your PC.
Seriously, though. Windows has a fuck ton of issues, but it seems like every distro I install I am eventually greeted with something just completely breaking for no reason whatsoever and spend the next 6 hours scouring Linux forums for a solution, where everyone is just hostile as fuck screaming at people to “figure it out yourself” and to “use Terminal”.
Glad it works for you, though. Wonder how many downvotes this cold take is going to net me lol.
Weird way to say spend hours fixing something that just randomly borked your PC.
by work, I meant actual work, and not fixing something.
Last time I fixed something was a few weeks ago. It was MPV needing an update(which was totally my fault, as I often forget to do updates) as a yt-dlp script wasn’t working.As for something breaking, my experience has been the opposite. Probably because I don’t own any newest hardware and don’t do much gaming, or any other stuff that might require some proprietary service for optimal functioning.
Also, my experience with the community has been excellent so far. Even my basic questions(e.g.: dual boot) were answered promptly and nicely by the community(I mostly use #linux on IRC, or distro-specific forums like linux mint forum).
I’d suggest you to give GNU/Linux one more try. Probably try out something like Nobara if you’re into games. Or maybe Linux mint if you want it to just work.
Maybe you just weren’t lucky the first time.
And don’t worry about fake internet points. They mean nothing.
I decided to try Linux Mint a few months back at work, and was very pleasantly surprised at how easy to use and just-works it is.
We use some fedora build VMs, but I generally have a monitor dedicated to Mint while having the company’s Microsoft stuff on another.
I use Ubuntu on my desktop and when I had an NVIDIA video card I did have fairly frequent issues when the proprietary drivers would update and then not play nice with something. That card died and I replaced it with an AMD video card and I don’t think I’ve had a “dive into the annals of gnu/Linux architecture” session since.
I also had some bad RAM at one point and spent a couple of hours trying in vain to boot into either Linux or Windows.
I do think it’s fair to say that there are some things that Windows handles a little more gracefully, but the situation is not nearly as bad as it used to be / people still tend to think it is.
I also have a Windows laptop, and from time to time I’ll have an issue that I’m trying to fix and I’ll end up on the Microsoft forum where someone asked my question and the answers are either answers to questions that weren’t asked or a set of steps that must have been based on a different build of Windows or something because there’s no way to follow them on my installation of Windows 11. So maybe that’s not hostile like the old school Linux forums, but it’s still unhelpful.
I think both are fine, both have their pros and cons, and those pros and cons aren’t as different as people make them out to be.
Is chatGPT any good at fixing Ubuntu problems?
I haven’t tried that, but my guess is generally no based on other things I’ve tried chatGPT for and things I’ve read. It would probably have some lucky hits and those would seem like magic, but it would mostly produce correct-sounding answers that don’t fix the problems.
The only times I’ve “broken” something it’s because I did dumb shit lol. I’ve heard tell of it happening but usually not on something like Debian LTS, usually arch. Also, if you’re looking for a GUI solution that doesn’t exist, yes, people will often say “use the terminal” and unless you said “no terminal” they usually say “try this command…” with it. I’ve only had one dude be an insufferable prick about it in all my time on linux, and it got him (CHEFKOCH) banned from c/linux like 2y ago. I’m not gonna downvote you for being wrong, but you are at least outdated in your info.
Amen to that.
A lot of Linux users have forgotten how tech-savvy they are even compared to the average power user. Saying “Linux just works” shows just how tone deaf they are.
As someone who didnt know anything about file systems besides FAT32 and NTFS, and as someone who isn’t comfortable using command line, trying to switch to Linux was horrible. On windows something might not work they way you want it to, but it does kinda work. On Linux I felt like I had to fight every step of the way to do simple tasks.
Its like buying a car - I’m not a gearhead, I just want something that gets me around when I put petrol in. I want to drive it off the lot, even if there are a few maddening features like the cup holder being in the wrong place. I don’t want to have to choose the right wheels and assemble them, I don’t want to have to buy seats and install them, and I don’t want to stop every other day to figure out why something isn’t working.
Yep, this has been my experience too.
People shit on windows, but it was easy to navigate, and generally made an effort to keep you from breaking it and you pretty much never had to enter a command line for anything as an average user.
Linux troubleshooting, especially for new people, is going to become a much bigger problem as time goes on because any searched solution basically boils down to copy and pasting stuff into terminal and hoping its 1)still relevant and 2) doesnt break everything worse. Which is probably why so many immutable distros have popped up, to give that windows level of protection.
As for hostility? Its still there, in pockets. Not so much on lemmy from what i’ve seen, but it still exists elsewhere… but it is significantly better overall than it was 10+ years ago, where questions about problems were seemingly treated as insults against the prophet and were responded to with great aggression, and often racist undertones.
Maybe I’m the minority, but I’ve never really broken my Linux. Sure, it’s NixOS, so it’s a little more stable than many other distros, but still, I have a much better time with it than I do with Windows
Weird esoteric issues happen on Windows too. I had a bug where I couldn’t create a new folder from Windows Explorer, which I never figured out and didn’t resolve itself with reboots or even Windows updates. I probably could have spent a half day tracking it down and fixing it, but someone less tech savvy would probably have had to reinstall Windows. Instead I just popped a terminal and used mkdir whenever I needed a new folder until I upgraded to Windows 11 and that resolved it.
Point is, computers just suck sometimes regardless of what software they run. Or I’m just a magnet for ridiculous arcane bugs, you decide.
This might come across as Linux fanboyism but I currently have Linux, Windows, macOS, iPadOS, Android, and FreeBSD all running on various devices around my house and they all suck in their own unique ways.
every distro I install I am eventually greeted with something just completely breaking for no reason whatsoever
This happens on Windows too and the fixes you have to apply aren’t less esoteric.
For example: User complains that Spyder won’t start on her brand-new laptop. Installation seems perfectly fine, nothing wrong there, no corruption or obvious missing bits. Dig around in the Windows log files, find some fairly generic error. Do a bit of googling, eventually decide to just search Github for issues mentioning Spyder not loading. Turns out the laptop is just too new and the AMD graphics driver Windows installs on its own has issues with the IGPU. So replacing that with newer the version AMD distributes fixes it.
Or, with Windows 11, if you want the start menu on the left and the Explorer context menu usable: Sure, just open powershell and run these commands to create new, weird registry keys to force it, btw these are not supported by Microsoft, you’re on your own.
I’d rather choose the OS that doesn’t have the audacity to charge money and then blast me with ads in the start menu.
Same, does it work? If it means booting into a DE and being able to move your mouse and type on your keyboard, sure most distros can do that.
It’s those little gotchas everywhere that gets you. Enabling video acceleration on Nvidia in firefox? Getting LDAC to work on Bluetooth? Etc. etc.
Do most distros work? Yeah, only if you don’t mind software encoding, or compiling from some user-provided repos.
I have a few hobby boxes running all flavours of distros, but whenever I need something to just work with no caveats, I go back to w11.
This happend to me a lot 10-15 years ago but since then has never again happened to me. With the noteable exception of Arch Linux which does tell you to read update notes though.
Just a hobby 😉
Won’t be big
This is an interesting piece of history that I have never seen. Thanks for sharing
happy birthday you bloody penguin <3
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Good bot
