I miss the free software activism bent of old slashdot. There was so much optimism at Linux and others being the way of the future, and beating Microsoft at the desktop. I feel like the Unix enthusiast's shift to the Mac kind of killed some of that. If people think a desktop ui is a "solved problem" (by Apple), there end up fewer people interested in those kind of projects. Now it's pretty common for a free software desktop to be a punchline in a joke, mocked as some infeasible fantasy and inevitable failure.
It's nuts to me how much peole despised MS at the time. I remember getting a hacked/modded version of Halo 2 (2004) and it came with a picture of Gates with a bullet hole in his head. Which is sick and not appropriate, but people despised him.
They've done a really good job of rehabilitating their image. Having grown up at the time, it's hard for me to see Gates and them as different than that. It does make me somewhat sad that we've embraced a future where the bad guys won, that the schoolyard bully that tried to stifle progress is now succeeding by adopting that which they tried to strangle int he cradle.
Sadly some of the re-evaluation of Gates is due to the bar getting lower and lower, when it comes to corporate governance in the tech space. MCI/Worldcom, Bezos’s ruthless Amazon, Zuckerberg and googlers despising their own users, Jobs squeezing money out of everyone, Larry Ellison being Larry Ellison, and Ballmer being even more of a bully than Gates was...
Yes, the hate for Gates does look a bit naive now. To be fair, at the time there was a huge amount of admiration for him in the mainstream (I still meet people convinced he “invented” this or that software alone in a garage), so the hate was really niche. Hi
There are famous stories of Bill Gates being a collosal jerk, circulating both inside and outside of Microsoft. (Disclaimer: My comment could be perceived as anti MS, but even I sold out and worked for MS for a few years.) I believe those stories are true.
I have also seen commentary over the years that his non-profit is arrogant and sometimes harms when it is trying to help. I am less able to assess those stories to know if I agree or disagree. But I do know it is not always universally praised.
I do know that MS company culture was pretty aggressive in the time I was there. Some of that has got to be rooted in his famous personal aggressiveness, setting a poor example for others. Some form of that aggressiveness stayed with the company long after he left it.
But I do think Gates himself has had a personal transformation or re-consideration of his old self. And it is a credit to him that he's done that. His commentary on the coronavirus shows it, for example. Probably his retirement from software, having more money than any one person could know what to do with, his famous friendship with philanthropy-minded Warren Buffet, has given him some perspective about what he can do with the next phase of his life, without the need for profit motive or egotistical drive for competition.
It would make me feel a lot better if Gates didn't buddy with Epstein even after his first conviction for trafficking teenagers. I think MS, if it wants to have some respect, should basically disown him unless he has a legit and contrite apology.
On the other hand, Bill Gates is not law enforcement, is not the criminal justice system. Speaking abstractly, if someone is convicted of a crime, goes to prison, and is let out... At what point does a prominent individual need to say they'll never talk to that person under any circumstances? In some cases that would be too extreme and in the abstract, repentant ex-convicts may deserve forgiveness.
In hindsight it's easy to say Epstein wasn't that. But we don't know how he may have misrepresented himself to Gates and others. We know from the press that there was some sketchy business involved in his relatively short prison stay, which I presume Gates did not know. My guess is it's not always an easy call to make, whether or not to show forgiveness to an ex-con, whether or not you can trust them as reformed, etc. The article you cite says he regrets making the wrong call.
Ubuntu works great, i just installed it in a VM and it told me i can use "Ubuntu Software" to install new applications - i opened that and it was completely empty for a few seconds until images started to appear.
Then i went to games which was empty and nothing would appear. I closed it and started it again and now games would show up, so i decided to install "WolfeDoom" which sounded interesting. While it was downloading, i went back and decided to also install ZZT (i think) so i pressed Install for that too. That installed fast so i tried to run it and... nothing happened. I tried again, but nothing - the game's name appeared for a bit at the top but then disappeared without any indication about what was wrong. So i uninstalled it and closed the Software app.
At this point i thought to try WolfenDoom but... i couldn't find it anywhere. I opened the Software app to see where it was, went to the installed tab, scrolled down and found it, but instead of "Launch" (or whatever) it had an "Install" button next to it (which is weird since i was in the installed category). I clicked it and an error popped up about some state or whatever. So i restarted the Software app, went directly to the game's page and pressed Install from there - error again. So i googled to figure out what is wrong and i found vague messages about it.
Eventually it fixed itself. Somehow. My guess it was installing at the background but this wasn't shown anywhere and trying to install it again was failing because of that.
I agree, I just upgraded fro Ubuntu 18 to 19 to 20. I noticed it took some time to get going too, and suspect there are background tasks that complete after the base OS install.
It reminds me of Early Mac OS X in someways, around the leopard, lion, mountain lion times. Just seems to work.
There is BSD code in XNU just like there was BSD code in NeXTstep in the 80s but the link and resemblance is pretty tenuous. And it would be a huge stretch to call Darwin an open source project. There were efforts to build free distros out of it, long abandoned. And that is ignoring the vast amounts of closed components.
I don't think you get that I'm citing specifically the culture of free software activism. A device that is hardwired to only load Linux kernels crytopgraphically signed by corporate entities doesn't fit the bill, nor is it great to have a bunch of proprietary stuff on top.
> It's not likely that closed components could have existed without a foundation of linux/bsd.
This is false and I think pretty naive.
On the Apple side, I'll cite that NeXT's equivalent of Cocoa used to run on Windows NT in the 1990s. They didn't need Mach/BSD or any form of Unix to run AppKit. I will also note that today many Apple features depend heavily on the Mach kernel interfaces and less upon the BSD layer.
On the Android side, note that many people are saying Fuschia will replace Linux in that environment.
I completely understand you're referring to FSF culture. I'm not referring to that. I've followed Richard Stallman for over 20 years.
Linux/BSD source code were part of a lineage that many of today's operating systems, whether you want to package that up as Mach, UMX, whatever.
1. Mac OS X includes oss code in it's foundation.
"Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs once tried to hire Linus Torvalds, the irrepressible Finnish coder who created Linux and gave the thing its name.
But Torvalds said "No," and not long after that, Apple hired Jordan Hubbard, the creator of FreeBSD, a lesser known, but still thriving, open source operating system based on UNIX. It was a better fit: Mac OS X shares conceptual roots with Linux, but it shares honest-to-goodness code with FreeBSD." [1]
"The code at the heart of Mac OS X was born in the mid-1980s at NeXt Computer, the company Steve Jobs founded after his first stint at Apple. NeXt built a operating system based on two existing UNIX projects: Mach, from Carnegie Melon University, and BSD, created at the University of California at Berkeley. But on this base, they added their own, private code – such as the Cocoa programming framework and a graphical user interface – hoping to provide the sort of slick software environment pioneered by the Apple Macintosh." [1]
"Darwin, the core of Mac OS X, was open source and included quite a bit of code from FreeBSD." [1]
2. Android
"The Linux kernel is an extremely important part of the software on nearly every Android device. This section describes Linux kernel development and release models (below), stable and long-term supported (LTS) kernels (including why all Android devices should use stable releases instead of cherry picking patches), kernel configuration and hardening, requirements for interfaces and the modular kernels (introduced in Android O), kernel debugging and network testing, and SquashFS." [2]
"Android's history dates to 2003, when a team of California entrepreneurs launched Android, Inc. Their initial goal was to develop software for digital cameras. In 2005 Google acquired the company and put the team of Android, Inc. developers to work building an operating system for phones that was based on the Linux kernel and adaptations of some other open source utilities." [3]
I appreciate you feel the need to feel better about yourself at the expense of others by calling others names, but there's really no need, nor does it add to advancing any kind of understanding about the topic, except perhaps shining a light on jumping to myopic reactions and judgements of others.
I will not be replying to further messages from you on this thread for the above reason.
> I appreciate you feel the need to feel better about yourself at the expense of others by calling others names,
You have misread me. I do not feel better than anybody else nor do I feel I need to. I also do not feel that I am calling you or anybody names. I have not met you, I am confident you are a wonderful human being. It is, independent of the thinker, naive to think Mac, iOS, or Android needs Linux or BSD and couldn't be ported to or based upon something else in the start.
I mean, apart from the fact that NeXT's key pieces were also ported to NT as they struggled to find a market for NeXTstep, in Apple's search for a kernel, they also considered BeOS, and they had a short lived project MkLinux which had Linux in the same co-position with Mach as BSD has with XNU ... This reflects the attitude that any modern kernel will do, that they can swap them in and out with little consequence. A similar attitude that people advocate when saying they ought to port Android to Fuschia.
But many people also exaggerate the role of BSD in XNU. In many places there is little resemblance. They continue to diverge over time.
You have also evidently misread me on some other matters in the thread and this brings me to read your reply as a bit of a non sequitur, but it's not worth debating them and you say you're cutting me off. So I do hope you have a good day, fine sir or madam. Best regards, friend.
Where is the data on that? I just googled around, I don't know if this site is reputable but it would indicate mobile didn't overtake PCs until 2016 and even now the gap is not huge:
I know I've read that PC sales went down pretty severely around the 2011 date you cite, however, it could be that sales of new PCs are down much more than actual usage because PCs need to be replaced less frequently.
By 2011 the Linux desktop was already the butt of jokes. That dream died about 5 years earlier, when Ubuntu spread like wildfire in the geek community and then... failed to make any serious inroad anywhere else.
