If you know anything about Linux’s history, you’ll remember it all started with Linus Torvalds posting to the Minix Usenet group on August 25, 1991, that he was working on “a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.” We know that the “hobby” operating system today is Linux, and except for PCs and Macs, it pretty much runs the world.

Did you ever wonder, though, how it went from being one person’s project to being a group effort? I knew most of the story because I’d been using Linux since 1993. But I thought I’d ask Linus, and some of the early Linux developers.

  • osanna@thebrainbin.org
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    7 days ago

    Linus doesn’t get enough credit. imagine if the internet was run on windows. we’d have to restart the internet every couple of days

    • BrightCandle@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      Would be a nightmare to adminster as well, has so much less automation and tooling for deployment and updating of software. Even now the updating of apps on windows is a mess and the closest they have come is winget that centralises the entire thing through stores, completely useless for the corporate world. There is a reason Linux won on the server.

  • agentTeiko@piefed.social
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    7 days ago

    Pet peeve of mine, what do you call a computer that runs Linux I’m pretty sure its also a PC. Windows shouldn’t have a monopoly of that term.

      • freeman@feddit.org
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        7 days ago

        Does a Mac turn into a PC when using Linux on it? Thats at least how it would work with my definition of PC, which is “personal” meaning that you control it fully. But I never thought that deep about it really.

        • Romulon@sh.itjust.works
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          7 days ago

          With your definition of PC, “which is ‘personal’ meaning that you control it fully” I wouldn’t consider a computer running Windows to be a PC.

          • bampop@lemmy.world
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            6 days ago

            Even when it’s running Windows, you’re free to install Linux whenever you want. When that’s no longer true is when it stops being a PC imo