Funny how he made it basically for his desktop computer.
33 years later, 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.)
(Edit: to be more fair with quotes, it might be the case that I “hallucinated” the quote. he might not have said that, or he might have just said part of it and other part would be someone else’s comment. This cio.com article is probably a better source on his position )
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.
You have to use a Windows desktop at home.
Sincerely,
Barnes & Noble
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.
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.
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
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.
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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.”
…probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks,as that’s all I have. :-(.
Cuteness.
As in hilarity.
That’s why he needed glasses.
it seems so innocent, lol
He was 22 years old. Pretty incredible.
Just look at those nested parentheses. A true sign of (pedantic) greatness, when a person needs to clarify something in their earlier clarification.
I love it™ (The nested parentheses are one of the greatest tools known to mankind (And to all other creatures))
To paraphrase an old tweet: “parentheses - for when every thought comes with bonus sub-thoughts”.
I always tell myself I am reading minds when I read inside parentheses
Who’s to say you’re not (I won’t, at the least)?
I have been stopping myself from using those and instead restructure my sentence. But if people like it, guess I can start keeping it.
I do find it more useful, however, to have a kind of a reference to the thing written at the end instead [1], but markdown doesn’t seem to have anything for that, and using the syntax for Markdown references, is only useful for hyperlinks, or if the reader is willing to read the hover text 2.
[1]: Like This. I would love it if the markdown viewer would link the above [1] to this line. Maybe with a scrolldown effect.
Eh, Lemmy Connect does not format it properly.
Neither does Voyager (Wefwef) :(
Neither does Jerboa 💀
People like these? I do em all the time but always feel I’m overexplaining.
The amount of effort I do to try and avoid using double parentesis is trully herculean.
I think that stuff is the product of a completionist/perfectionist mindset - as one is writting, important details/context related to the main train of thought pop-up in one’s mind and as one is writting those, important details/context related to the other details/context pop-up in one’s mind (and the tendency is to keep going down the rabbit hole of details/context on details/context).
You get this very noticeably with people who during a conversation go out on a tangent and often even end up losing the train of thought of the main conversation (a tendecy I definitelly have) since one doesn’t get a chance to go back and re-read, reorganise and correct during a spoken conversation.
Personally I don’t think it’s an actual quality (sorry to all upvoters) as it indicates a disorganised mind. It is however the kind of thing one overcomes with experience and I bet Mr Torvalds himself is mostly beyond it by now.
perfectionist mindset - as one is writing,
I think an “M-Dash (perfectionist mindest— as one is writing,)” would be more appropriate than an “N-Dash” in your statement. No ‘nested’ parentheses needed (unless you’re looking to add non-essential (though insightful) info to your sentence); but the type of… “PAUSE” makes all the difference
Some of those parens could’ve been replaced with commas and retain their meaning (that’s what I do to avoid nesting, so that it doesn’t get confusing).
You have command of English grammar, clearly.
How’s your Finnish?
Not as good as my other primary languages, I have to admit. Finnish has too many consonants for my taste.
Wait until you need nested commas, those lists won’t delineate themselves!
Or he could have used brackets.
I’ve never seen that being used, but it seems it’s a thing in English. What if you wanna best deeper? Do you go {}? Then <>? «»?
Not really an English thing so much as a math thing that makes too much sense to not use elsewhere. For instance, in math you might have x[3 - 7{3y + (a * b)}]. I haven’t actually seen them go deeper than three sets, though, so I’m not sure what would be next.
at that point I start recycling them, and go back to parenthesis.
so when bp = 300x - 3, this:
4( 4[ 4{ 15bp + 10 } - 375 ] - 2250 ) - 15000
would turn to
4( 4[ 4{ 15( 300x - 3) + 10 } - 375 ] - 2250 ) - 15000
perhaps not the best, but I rather stick to conventional symbols rather than using… idk, question marks? that’d be funny as hell, though
just picture it:
4© 4« 4¿ 15bp + 10 ? - 375 » - 2250 🄯 - 15000
I’ve had a teacher in elementary school scream at me for doing so. (Nesting parentheses is forbidden. [You are supposed to use brackets.])
It’s wild seeing square brackets for something other than array indexing.
I had a teacher that screamed at me for “taking the lords name in vain…” They’re definitely wrong from time-to-time ;-)
I had a science teacher that told us, “If you sneeze three times and nobody blesses you, the devil takes your soul!”
It’s science.
What did the teacher say about apostrophes to indicate possession?
No idea… stopped listening after I was adminished for my “god damnit…” ;-)
I once did double “parentheses” in speech when started doing streaming year ago, lol.
Yeah, I was looking at it today actually.
Happy Birthday, Linux.
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!
Jfc im older than Linux
Me too man, but not by much
“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
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.
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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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 :-(
(just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu)
Aged like fine milk. Looking at you, GNU Hurd.
not really, gnu is still a big professional project
GNU, or as I’d like to call it, GNU+PTerry
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.
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.
This one from LTT?
Poor Linus :c
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Ahh man only ata?
