A picture of bowls of eggs, flour, sugar, water, butter an sugar wit the text:

Happy 34th Birthday, Linux!

Here’s your cake, go ahead and compile it yourself.

Edit: fixed the text in the image to “34th”

  • MudMan@fedia.io
    0·
    1 month ago

    Man, Linux is one of those things where it’s less old than I think.

    I don’t see myself as an early adopter at all, but I remember trying to get some version of Debian running on the same Pentium PC I had gotten to play stuff like Duke 3D, and I don’t remember at the time thinking “oh, this is some new thing”, so I had assumed the concept existed for decades, rather than being just a handful of years old.

    • okwhateverdude@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Right? I started futzing with different distros (all two/three of them, lol) in the mid to late 90s. Had zero clue how new all of this stuff actually was at the time. It felt like a super power to run something other than DOS/Win9{5,8}/NT4. No stupid software keys. Could easily run network services, etc.

      • MudMan@fedia.io
        0·
        1 month ago

        The thing is in my memory it wasn’t that special because at the time computers came in a lot more flavors than now. There were a ton of semi-recent computers that used just some variant of Basic, others some variant of DOS, DOS and Windows were different things and both in use, Apple-IIs were a thing, but also Macs…

        I remember the first time I gave it a shot it was a bit of a teenage nerd challenge, because the documentation was so bad and you had to do the raw Arch thing with Debian and set up things step by step to get to a semblance of an X server, let alone a DE. And then after spending a couple nights messing with that I didn’t think about it much until a few years later when Ubuntu sort of figured out making things easy.

        By the mid 2000s I remember people my age laughing at older normies for not having heard of Linux already, so it all moved relatively fast. It was maybe less than a decade between it coming into being and then it being something you probably don’t use but you’ve heard of, which is faster than I would have said if you asked me.

        • okwhateverdude@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          1 month ago

          It got so big so fast. You’re absolutely right. The movie Antitrust (basically a david/goliath allegory between FOSS and Microsoft) came out in 2001! Linux and FOSS had become mainstream enough to end up in a hollywood movie where even the onscreen time of the computers showed legit shells and stuff. Now Linux literally runs on billions of devices, and powers the backend of a majority of companies. Even Microsoft did a 180(-ish) and maintain their own distro for their cloud shit, made .net cross platform to run on Linux, etc.

    • jaybone@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Redhat was shipping production shit by then.

      Still they could not compete with Microsoft.

      At least not in the consumer market.

      • MudMan@fedia.io
        0·
        1 month ago

        Arguably they still can’t.

        But yeah, I’m less surprised that they already existed and more suprised that I had already heard about them.

        • jaybone@lemmy.zipEnglish
          0·
          1 month ago

          I ended up switching to fedora in the early 2000s. (Which was their downstream at the time.) then later I switched to Ubuntu.

          Redhat still has some share in the cloud side server market. And it’s derivatives.

          Nobody on lemmy is going to say they use Redhat.

          • MudMan@fedia.io
            0·
            1 month ago

            I still have a Redhat install CD from the early to mid 2000s somewhere in the attic. I think it came with a PC magazine.

    • Diplomjodler@lemmy.world
      0·
      1 month ago

      UNIX used to be a thing for a long time before Linux came around. And altogether now: “Linux is just the kernel!”