this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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Linux
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I said it before and I will said it again: fuck off with the constant "Linux is not ready to go mainstream". Who cares? There will always be some software that doesn't support Linux and there will always be people who will prefer Windows. The goal was never to move everyone to Linux or create a OS perfect for everyone. The goal was to for Linux not to die because of shady MS practices, lack of HW support, DRM and proprietary standards. Guess what? Linux is not going anywhere now. We won. We can talk about something else now.
Generally speaking, Linux is already mainstream on most things except for the desktop. And I'd agree, perhaps we don't want to be mainstream anyways.
I wouldn't say that we don't want to, just that it was never the true objective. 20 years ago to goal was to make Linux just popular enough so that big corporations would stop ignoring or directly fighting it. There was a real danger that MS will convince PC manufactures to lock the bootloaders, most websites will run only on IE and Linux will not have drivers for most devices. I could end up just like all the opensource phone OSes: few supported devices, few contributors and few users. But we managed. Most big corporations now actively support Linux and Linux has support for most devices. I would like to see more articles acknowledging this win and less articles saying that "still non everyone loves Linux".