Support Board
Date/Time: Fri, 22 Nov 2024 05:15:22 +0000
Post From: Native Support for Linux. Will This Ever Come?
| [2024-06-11 04:21:02] |
| User740504 - Posts: 110 |
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History Lesson None of you seem to know the history of your own OS. Shocking. I hope you caught the sarcasm there. That may have been above your 3rd grade reading level. Unix grew out of Bell Labs at AT&T, a FOR PROFIT company. MIT worked with AT&T, as they do with many other companies and agencies, to further the advancement of technological computing. MIT has a habit of spawning off companies or aiding existing companies with their work/research which helps advance the US economy and technological prowess. Unix required a license to use. Unix was confined to companies and universities, which meant that the average person had zero access to it. Also, Linux != Unix. You need to make the distinction between Linux (which is freely available and relatively cost-free) and Unix. Presented with MS-DOS and Unix (both of which required a user to purchase/license, so stop hating on Windows and hate on both if you must), Linus decided that he wanted to create his own operating system, release it into the wild, and allow other people to use, modify, and advance it. How this pertains to this post Microsoft is not evil. Companies have overhead. Companies need to turn a profit. Without profit nothing advances. Most people aren’t willing to work for free. Buying raw materials requires money. Office space requires money. Manufacturing plans require capital. Shipping, packaging, and distributing products and services all have costs, which is something that not only requires capital in today’s modern world, but the ability to make more on a consistent basis. You cannot hate a company for trying to turn a profit. While it may come as a shock to some of you, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs fundamentally changed the world when they introduced "PERSONAL" computing to mainstream life. Without them, what we have now likely wouldn't exist, at least in its current form. Say what you want about either of those two men, but they got the job done, and sometimes that means making hard choices. Sometimes those hard choices involve design decisions that may not be the most elegant, but work for that time period and within that time constraint. I also don't really think they based their decisions around what some internet weebs might think of them decades later with the benefit of both hindsight and freely accessible and easily attainable information. Does anyone here remember having to go to the library to learn anything? It’s easy to sit there and say “based on my OS Design 401 class at my ‘no-name-university’ I was taught x, y, and z, and Microsoft sucks because they didn’t follow such design principles…”. Have you forgotten that the people writing the books and teaching the classes on what you should do and how you should design systems likely learned from or participated in companies such as Microsoft? Where do you think this knowledge comes from? Have any of you had to make choices on OS design and were there for its inception? It's quite easy to shit on an operating system having no experience with designing, running, marketing, and deploying it in the real world yourselves. I’m really curious to know how many of you have actually done low-level work and banged your head against the wall enough times to know just how fantastically difficult is it, not just to create it and manage it but actually ship the damn product. Ask me how I know. Now on to Linus. Linus likely would not have had the privilege of writing his own OS and the hardware to release it on without the personal computing revolution that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs created. He must at least give some credit to having the mass-produced hardware that allowed him to even glimpse into the computing world, which likely would have been confined to companies and universities. Yes, there were other computers and other companies releasing them, but it wasn’t until the big two took off that the PC revolution went mainstream enough to let anyone without 10s to 100s of thousands of dollars to get involved in any serious computational work. How does this apply in 2024? Given the fact that I both value my time and am not in the habit of spending my off-time googling for answers to problems that should have been solved decades prior (I’m talking about basic functionality with the Linux Desktop ecosystem that seems like it has been crazy-glued together, which is funny because someone mentioned that it was designed by “scientists and hackers” but neglects to mention that Linux is open source so any moron with a keyboard and github account can contribute, negating the necessity of being a scientist or hacker), I am less inclined to use an operating system like Linux when I can pay a slight fee for an operating system that works WELL ENOUGH out of the box and lets me get on with my day without spending a ridiculous amount of time just trying to get it to work correctly. Every single day I had a Linux Distro up on my alternate PC, trying as hard as I might to use without wanting to eject it into the void, I would ALWAYS find some problem that needed fixing. It would never just work. Always tinkering, always fixing, always googling… I wasn’t using the operating system; the operating system was using me. I was its whore. With the monumental price of $199 that I paid for the privilege of using the Windows 11 Workstation Pro license I have the luxury of calling up someone and having them fix my problem without me having to worry about it or having to fix it myself. I do not have the time or patience to sit there and google for 4 hours, trying to figure out why I’m stuck in dependency hell and how I’m going to fix it, when I could just wipe the damn garbage off my PC and install an operating system that can get me up and running within 10 minutes. And to the Neanderthal who suggested I only know JS Anyone who doesn’t understand that you use the right tool for the job and talks down on certain languages obviously has never worked in the industry in any professional capacity. Let me know how Data Structures 301 works out for you. PM me if you have any questions. Date Time Of Last Edit: 2024-06-11 04:27:17
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