Linux milestones
Many battles were fought – and coffee urns emptied – to get distros to where they are today. Here’s a quick recap…
Linux distributions have come a long way since the good old days. In the beginning, of course, there were no distros. You’d start with the kernel, somehow bootstrap a barebones system, fetch some GNU tools, mess with the make files, compile those packages, install them, realise you’d got your Makefile wrong, tidy up the mess. Rinse, lather, repeat. It was all great fun.
More often than not you had to get these things on CD or even floppy disk in the post, unless you had access to the internet (or a friend in a computer science department). Then in 1992 came SLS, which inspired Slackware and later frustrated Ian Murdock into creating Debian. Yggdrasil, the first Linux live CD, was launched shortly after SLS, which required a gluttonous 8MB of memory and a gargantuan 100MB of disk space. The first stable version of Debian didn’t appear until 1996, by which time Red Hat Linux was on the scene and all of a sudden people realised there was money to be made with that thar Linux.
It’s easy to overlook the contributions of those pioneer distributions, and other giants such as SUSE and Mandrake. And indeed those of lesser-heard ones such as Conectiva (a distant ancestor of Mageia that popularised Linux in South America). There’s a tendency to just focus on Ubuntu as the great humaniser of Linux.
By the same token, there’s a tendency to dismiss desktop Ubuntu today as a sideshow to Canonical’s commercial success. Ubuntu continues to do great things for
Linux, and is an excellent distribution for beginners and professionals alike. But what happened in the mid-2000s was pretty exciting. Suddenly, here was Linux that anyone could use. It did everything that Windows XP did (except maybe talk to your wireless device). There was an office suite that could mostly open Word documents. Finally, something was standing up to the Microsoft juggernaut…
Things are different now. Microsoft’s attitude towards open source has changed and desktop computing isn’t the be-all and end-all it once was. The web is truly OSagnostic, so there’s no danger of say, your bank not supporting you if you use Linux. We take for granted the ability to watch Netflix or play games, but this would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. Today Intel, Oracle and even Microsoft (sort of) now have their own Linux offerings. A few stand-out distros have emerged that have brought genuine innovation, whether technical or ideological, to the Linux world. So let’s have a look at some of them…
Changing times “Today Intel, Oracle and even Microsoft (sort of) now have their own Linux offerings.”