On Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 5:14 PM Arthur Krewat <krewat@kilonet.net> wrote:

https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/08/26/0051234/celebrating-the-28th-anniversary-of-the-linux-kernel

Leaving licensing and copyright issues out of this mental exercise, what
would we have now if it wasn't for Linux? Not what you'd WANT it to be,
although that can add to the discussion, but what WOULD it be?

I'm not asking as a proponent of Linux. If anything, I was dragged
kicking and screaming into the current day and have begrudgingly ceded
my server space to Linux.

But if not for Linux, would it be BSD? A System V variant? Or (the
horror) Windows NT?

BSD was in decent enough shape at the time to run on PCs. Though it fragmented early through no fault of Linux. And the AT&T lawsuit created a lot of FUD in the area without actually protecting System V. It's unclear if another thing would have popped up to fill the void... Linux flourished in the confusion, but without it, it's hard to know if something else would have been developed before the AT&T lawsuit settled.

Warner

I do understand that this has been discussed on the list before. I
think, however, it would make a good late-summer exercise. Or late
winter depending on where you are :)

art k.

I ran both FreeBSD (up through at least 4.11 (and have the Tshirt) and NetBSD back in the 0.8 0.9 time frame.  My final -- (I used to move between them based on stability and driver support) -- move to Linux was caused by a lack of drivers for the Lenovo Workstation that used the Marvell 88SE63XX which with 5 SAS/SATA drives on it and 3 available on the Intel SATA controller would've been a great in-house server.

I really preferred the FreeBSD stability and docs back in the early 1990's -- but by 2000 my jobs were all going Linux (Red Hat Sysadmin mostly) and I figured the work was moving to supported RHEL.  One of the things that often made me migrate was the support (in the early days) of all the weird interfaced cdrom drives like the Panasonic and other pre-ATAPI stuff.

I'm going to revisit the ZFS on Linux stuff when Ubuntu puts it in their installer.  That will finally get me what I want on the D20.

Bill