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Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

Software popularity is almost always a historical accident rather than a reflection of users' preferences.

Almost nobody used the original Unix-tools on any Unix (like Irix, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and Tru64). Everybody installed the GNU tools, that's why after some time every vendor shipped them with their Unix as add-on disks.

Not really, because devs would have to put up with what the likes of people like myself actually made available on the servers they had to telnet into for development.

The only big UNIX where I actually did install GNU stuff was on Solaris 2.6 via the GNU packages repository, because I was requested to do so.

All our HP-UX and Aix boxes used the vendor tooling (including the C compilers).

> Not really, because devs would have to put up with what the likes of people like myself actually made available on the servers they had to telnet into for development.

Fortunately that didn't work when you needed 3D graphics hardware. But I guess you worked in a 'server' company, not a graphics (3D or engineering) one?

> All our HP-UX and Aix boxes used the vendor tooling (including the C compilers).

Of course, GCC was only needed for most of the later (early 2000s) OSS like Mozilla that didn't work with the native compilers because of missing GNU extensions. That's one thing I don't miss - the prices of compilers. SGI took more than 10,000 € for their MipsPro C, C++ and Fortran compilers but without 'advanced' optimization options like auto parallelization and their 'IDE' tools, Developer Workshop. That reminded my of Totalview (a debugger from ???): now Perforce bought them https://totalview.io/

Of course it did, ever heard of OpenGL and X Windows on AIX or SGI

Or SGI Onyx, for another example.

In fact the whole cloud streaming hype is basically a bunch of people rediscovering graphics programming with timesharing on UNIX.

Sorry, I badly phrased that. I was talking about a company that used Unix on their servers, instead of workstations (usually for 3D Work). Although many used Indys and later O2s and Octanes as terminals for their Crimson or Onyx (2) (but not via telnet). That's what _I_ did and in these environments (usually Irix, some Solaris, AIX and HP-UX) the GNU tools were usually installed (except on single purpose computers that only ran one program, like F/F/I, Softimage or Maya or some 3D CAD). Maybe in the big automotive companies (using 3D CAD/CAM) the admins were, well 'enterprisey', but normally you were root on your workstation as developer.

Sure, I didn't want to make it there was only one way to do it, I just happened to be more used to such enterprise style configurations.

Actually one way to mix both, while controlling what people were allowed to do on their workstations was to boot via tftp and have $HOME mapped noexec over NFS.

A solution used in some labs at the university campus.

Kind of hard to separate cause and effect there. Why does my dad prefer Windows? He's used it for 30 years and he's used to it. If he switched to Ubuntu, would he prefer that? Perhaps, but there's a lot of stuff to learn. So he prefers Windows, in some sense.

I have the same problem with textmate :-(

I think for a large number of people it would make no difference as they are in the browser at all times, or the software they use on the daily is available for Linux, too.

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