23 Feb
2017
23 Feb
'17
5:29 a.m.
Arno - thanks for more on this, as I think you scratched a difference
between your experience and my own.
By the time Linux shows up in the early 1990s, people like me had been
developing UNIX for a long time and the novelty of hacking on the system,
making changes, bug fixes was gone. I just wanted to use it on a PC/386.
BSD for the 386 worked and so Linux was a step backwards and I was only
going there because I felt I needed too. I remember when I first got
Slackware running, after the trying Linus's 0.9 mumble release.... and it
actually sort of ran ... saying "maybe this will work" but then I start
running it issues such as I could not back up it like my other systems,
network hosed up, few scripts "just worked", etc..
Yet, one of my coworkers who was about 2/3 years out of school at that
point, thought Linux was so cool because of all things Arno suggested. He
could submit bug reports and he changes go in. When I was b*tching about
something breaking, he would say - "Clem you know how to fix it And I
would reply "yup I do. But I don't want to." This was a the system I
wanted to use ( at home ). I get paid to hack at work. I wanted a
DOS/Windows alternative for home that I could rely on. I was not looking
for a yet another system to do development (I had that).
Which shows that difference... I was part of Chet's club, so I was hacking
on UNIX already, and I did not need/want another system at home to hack
just to keep my day to day working at home (or my wife being able to print
things etc). The point was that I did not mind fixing the occasional
thing I ran into with BSD - but those problem were few and usually had to
do with new device bring up. But once something was was running, I could
just use it. But the Linux systems I could not do that - they were very
fragile, so it was not "fun" -- it was work.
That was probably different for many of you. Linux was fun and cool, just
like UNIX had been for me 10-15 years earlier in the mid 1970s.
Clem