Comment by lproven | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lproven | Hacker News Reader

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[OP here]

> Red Hat made linux mainstream.

1. In the English-speaking world, mainly meaning North America.

For instance, SUSE is just as old, and brought Linux to the mainstream in Mitteleuropa. Not just in "DACH" (the German speaking world: Deutschland, Austria, Confœderatio Helvetica), but also for instance it was the first Czech-language distro. I worked for SUSE in Prague for 4 years, and it is still big in that part of the world.

Conectiva brought it to LatAm. TurboLinux to Japan. Etc., etc.

2. FSVO "mainstream" -- Red Hat Linux (note, not RHEL) was not really very useful as a desktop OS. I ran it, I used it, but trying to install something as complex as a desktop using raw RPM with no dependency management was nightmarish. That's where Mandrake came from: Red Hat refused to bundle KDE because Qt wasn't 100% GPL, so Mandrake ported KDE to RHL and bundled them.

Caldera was even earlier, and OpenLinux 1.0 with KDE was the first desktop distro I tried that was polished enough to make my primary OS for a while.

RHL was mainly a server OS, and as such, not very mainstream for most people.

> RHL was mainly a server OS, and as such, not very mainstream for most people.

I think that's what gp is saying: in the "enterprise" space, Solaris and HP-UX and Irix were kings. RedHat moved into that space by providing businesses the same model of support, while ALSO having a desktop version/free version for people to learn on.

RedHat THINKS they're still doing that with Fedora/CentOS Stream, but everyone disagrees.

I don't think Red Hat thinks they are doing it with CentOS and Fedora.

They are doing that with the free developer licencing.

> RedHat moved into that space by providing businesses the same model of support

But it didn't, not back then. In the 1990s, and for most of the company's first decade in business, it offered a free distribution and made most of its money from selling merchandise. Which is to say, not very much money at all.

It's only around 2003 but its management hit upon the idea of having a premium enterprise distribution, and making the only way to obtain it being to buy commercial support for it. That was a stroke of genius, and over the last 20 years, it's made the company very rich indeed — in stark contrast to its first decade.

> while ALSO having a desktop version/free version for people to learn on.

Again, that split only came after about a decade in business. For its first 10 years or so, there was only the free version.

Also, more to the point, back when Solaris and HP UX were big, Red Hat was still very small and mainly in the business of selling T-shirts and mouse mats.

It's a bit of a generalisation, but to an extent, it was Microsoft Windows which put commercial UNIX out of business, followed by Apple macOS which showed that UNIX on the desktop could be as good or better than Windows.

Windows established a marketplace of COTS high-end x86 kit with decent graphics capabilities and capable storage subsystems. Apple successfully piggybacked on that to make desirable easy to use RISC UNIX workstations for consumers, using their own processors but otherwise pretty much off the shelf PC industry parts.

And those things put together are what created a marketplace in which Linux could thrive and compete effectively.

When Linux was first invented, a high end PC had a crappy VGA card on the ISA bus, and many of them didn't even have mice, sound or networking as standard. I was there. It was grim.

1993... I bought a 486-dx2/66 with VESA Local Bus graphics, 1024x768 monitor with mouse and sound card. At first I ran OS/2 and later Yggdrasil Linux I think.

Same. (Well, 486sx33) OS/2 to Caldera, to NT4 and RedHat.

Yes, Wintel was huge for desktops, but not for high powered engineering software like EDA tools, modeling, simulation, etc. (I think AutoCAD was the only Windows software that real engineers used).

MacOS wasn't UNIX based until the big MacOS X rewrite which was around 1999, if I remember right. It felt very much like it was a reaction to Linux, especially with them making a big deal about how it was an Official UNIX(TM), not so subtly reminding us that Linux was not.

OSX wasn't a rewrite of MacOS. It was a new chrome over top of NeXTStep, which was BSD on Mach (or Mach in BSD). It wasn't a reaction to anything, it was Steve Jobs bringing NeXT in to give Apple a real OS.

What really killed Unix on workstations was NT, and it killed it when the first sgi NT workstations shipped.

In the server space, Linux began to replace Solaris once you could run Oracle on Linux. That was the end of every other Unix.

> OSX wasn't a rewrite of MacOS. It was a new chrome over top of NeXTStep

In addition major new chrome (Cocoa, OS X Finder, etc.) Mac OS X originally included a version of the older Mac OS APIs (Carbon) as well as a Mac OS 9 virtual environment (Classic) for running older non-Carbon apps. It was really a chimera that included pretty complete Mac OS 9 ABI support as well as a Mac-flavored version of NeXTSTEP.

It's a bit of a shame that Apple keeps abandoning its backward compatibility layers (I hope Rosetta2 will be different) but I guess that's what emulators are for.

Both excellent points. I really should have highlighted this:

> What really killed Unix on workstations was NT, and it killed it when the first sgi NT workstations shipped.

'Cos it sure as anything wasn't Windows 9x that persuaded businesses that Windows was a legitimate OS.

> It's only around 2003 but its management hit upon the idea of having a premium enterprise distribution, and making the only way to obtain it being to buy commercial support for it. That was a stroke of genius, and over the last 20 years, it's made the company very rich indeed — in stark contrast to its first decade.

Their enterprise support started around RH6, which was in 1999 and grew from there. It eventually morphed into RHEL because of the enterprise success, but didn't start with it.

Oh really? I didn't know that. OK, conceded.

~2003 was about when Amazon migrated their database servers off of HP-UX and onto relatively commodity Intel servers running Oracle/RHEL.

And RedHat had previously already displaced Digital Unix for all the webservers by the end of 2001.

They also organized courses and certification which is super important in Enterprise

Good point, yes.

Redhat didn't move into that space originally though. They moved into the SCO space off of the goodwill of 'geeks'. Then Redhat leveraged that into the larger UNIX space. That is why the community of 'geeks' is disappointed in them and their current moves. They have forgotten where they come from.

I don't know, this kinda feels like RMS always complaining that we don't call it GNU/Linux. Like, yeah, I get it, you deserve credit for sure, but...really?

> Confœderatio Helvetica

That's Switzerland (or if you're particularly pedantic: the Swiss Confederation) for those not brushed up on their Latin and Latin graphemes.

A name chosen largely as it's not in any one of the four official languages of Switzerland: German, French, Italian, and Romansh. A political compromise.

Well, it’s clearly biased towards Italian and French ;)

I was explaining what DACH stood for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_distribution_of_G...

TBH I didn't even consider that anyone might not know where Helvetia was, but you're right, I should have mentioned that.

Sorry, it just came off a bit pretentious. You could have just written "German-speaking world (e.g. Germany, Austria, Switzerland)"

It's a standard term:

https://ecommercegermany.com/blog/the-complete-guide-to-unde...

But a lot of people don't know it, and as the terms are in 3 languages, its meaning is not obvious.

If you’re providing links and explanations of DACH for my benefit, you don’t need to keep giving me links as I knew what DACH meant before reading any of your comments.

Nah, it's for the general record. ;-)

In another thread today, there are a lot of people upset and angry that they could not work out that a story about how an AI image generator can't create an image of a single banana, called the "AI lone banana problem" or something, did not say clearly that the problem was that an chatbot can't draw just one banana. And the story was really long at nearly 3000 words, which apparently is a 10-15 minute read and also apparently ain't nobody got time for that.

The HN commentariat does not always pick up on messages I would consider very obvious indeed... :-/

The acronym was new to me and I found your introduction of it into the conversation interesting, and your brief explanation of it sufficient.

(And I didn't in the least find it pretentious)

Oh, that is great to hear! Thank you!

I only learned the term a few years ago, while working at SUSE, and it fits a need I wasn't aware I had.

"The German-speaking world" is awfully long and yet remains imprecise:

* Are we talking about countries where there are some German speaking people? No -- that's probably every country.

* Are we referring to countries where there's a resident German-speaking minority? No. The USA has the Amish who speak "Pennsylvania Dutch" (among other minorities there among whom old folks speak Germanic languages) and that isn't Dutch at all but a Low Germanic dialect -- or a family of them.

Then there are the Volga Germans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga_Germans -- hundreds of thousands of German speakers around the former USSR.

* Are we talking about countries where German is the majority language then, like Anglosphere in English? The Teutonosphere?

* Oh, but hang on, then shouldn't the term be in German?

* Ah, but hang on, I do know a little German, and German speakers love coining new words by ramming existing words together, so it's probably been invented a dozen times. The Deutchsprachigewelt or something.

* Uhoh... maybe there is such a word but non-German speakers don't know it because they don't understand it, or they can't say it?

* And anyway, whose German then? Hochdeutsch or Schweitscherduutsch or Bayerisch or Swabish?

So I looked, and there is, and it's short and easy, and it cuts through the difficulty of two of the countries having different forms of German and the third having a really weird form of German but anyway it's not the standard language it's just one of four...

It's in German and English and Latin! Cool!

Czech is not german, at all.

SUSE definitely deserves credit here too! But also SUSE doesn't get hated on like Red Hat

Agreed (as someone in the English-speaking world whose first Linux distribution was SUSE) - though even SUSE uses rpm, as does TurboLinux, so in a very real way, they are standing on the shoulders of Red Hat.

Up to a point, yes. As I understand it, though, SUSE originally was bootstrapped from SLS, Soft Landing Linux, and it only gained rpm support later on.

Suse came from Slackware.

SLS provided the SL in "SLackware", I believe.

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