[TUHS] Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]

[Gregg Levine]

Hello!
And as it happens, I downloaded a two disk job and found it ran on my
first P100 system. I eventually tried others and much the same style
as some you. I've been running Slackware since they packaged the
2.2.xx series. I still do.

However I've got a Sun SPARC box here, who's happily running Solaris 10.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."


On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 6:29 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> 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
>