From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on inbox.vuxu.org X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.8 required=5.0 tests=DKIM_INVALID,DKIM_SIGNED, MAILING_LIST_MULTI,T_SCC_BODY_TEXT_LINE autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Received: (qmail 2267 invoked from network); 7 Jun 2022 14:30:43 -0000 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (2600:3c01:e000:146::1) by inbox.vuxu.org with ESMTPUTF8; 7 Jun 2022 14:30:43 -0000 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (localhost [IPv6:::1]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 54B0C40CF3; Wed, 8 Jun 2022 00:30:35 +1000 (AEST) Received: from outgoing.mit.edu (outgoing-auth-1.mit.edu [18.9.28.11]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 6048C40CF1 for ; Wed, 8 Jun 2022 00:30:25 +1000 (AEST) Received: from cwcc.thunk.org (pool-108-7-220-252.bstnma.fios.verizon.net [108.7.220.252]) (authenticated bits=0) (User authenticated as tytso@ATHENA.MIT.EDU) by outgoing.mit.edu (8.14.7/8.12.4) with ESMTP id 257EUEUM028919 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 bits=256 verify=NOT); Tue, 7 Jun 2022 10:30:16 -0400 DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=mit.edu; s=outgoing; t=1654612217; bh=iYGgUE8RzDphHY5Jkh8+a/9XO18F9CsWcw83pEU7F6g=; h=Date:From:To:Cc:Subject:In-Reply-To; b=HmiXR91D7K5doFtMYsi1D1Ks5UhrsdGmdllonDZ73H90QYTqySn0qZvu43ycc6II+ RxJQ94EuIWq8nPooOcSGPycO0VRCuVxsKhq2h9KQcz94VCEECVvEyRfK2NEBJ6ofyr a9Occ2Nmw1AAl/42pTbs6Vg4BN6ngf3ENB+tnPRFWGQuyiuCr3cXplCu3FKSe2UAbC kqijmn+9RIpy0lsROy6jZIQ4iffNWyV1xrO7RoibuBfW0NqanT9+cVdomirnKW7jeQ d/D+TFkVM8dPbgDTgKKN53BWE1hH02gG5H3cVq+PWrMcu9doXfQ9Rl1ke8Jp/cwhBf 9a5VKvZ5OaiCg== Received: by cwcc.thunk.org (Postfix, from userid 15806) id D212C15C3E1F; Tue, 7 Jun 2022 10:30:14 -0400 (EDT) Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2022 10:30:14 -0400 From: "Theodore Ts'o" To: Dan Cross , David Arnold Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: Message-ID-Hash: 4565EG3QTANWE5LCRMJGEBXYG77VI5ZG X-Message-ID-Hash: 4565EG3QTANWE5LCRMJGEBXYG77VI5ZG X-MailFrom: tytso@mit.edu X-Mailman-Rule-Misses: dmarc-mitigation; no-senders; approved; emergency; loop; banned-address; member-moderation; nonmember-moderation; administrivia; implicit-dest; max-recipients; max-size; news-moderation; no-subject; digests; suspicious-header CC: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society X-Mailman-Version: 3.3.6b1 Precedence: list Subject: [TUHS] Re: Fwd: [simh] Announcing the Open SIMH project List-Id: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list Archived-At: List-Archive: List-Help: List-Owner: List-Post: List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: On Tue, Jun 07, 2022 at 09:28:14AM +1000, David Arnold wrote: > Lest it be thought that all is sweetness and light in Linux-land, > there were years of fairly intense competition involved in getting > installers to the point that you can start with a downloaded image, > burn it to a USB, boot it, run it, and (optionally) make it persist > over a reboot, all with very minimal need to understand or care > about the many, many things going on under the hood. On Sun, Jun 05, 2022 at 09:40:44PM -0400, Dan Cross wrote: > > But every distribution has its own installer, and they vary wildly. The key is I think *competition*. Distributions were competing to attract a user base, and one of the ways they could do that was by improving the install experience. There were people who reviewed distributions based on which one had the better installer, and that helped users who were Windows refugees choose the ones that had the better installer. The other advantages of having a many distributions is that gave more people to opportunity to exercise leadership --- you can "drive the big red firetruck" by founding a distro like Debian or Slackware, and the people who are interested in improving a distribution can be different from those who drive kernel development. This is one of the things that I've learned from my rector at my church, who had a background in community organizing. One of the big differences between community organizing compared to the corporate world is that it's more important to give more people --- volunteers --- opportunities to contribute, and very often this is far more important than efficiently organizing a corporate-style team to get some job done. Was it inefficient to have multiple teams competing on installer development, and release engineering? Sure, but it also drew more people into the Linux ecosystem. > The ABI compatibility thing breaks down, too. A colleague was trying > to get the host-side of a Salae logic analyzer working on Arch, and it > doesn't. They more or less require Ubuntu 18.something, and that's > not what he runs. As far as most end-users are concerned, your > distribution of choice is "Linux", and distributions vary in all kinds of > ways. There are three different things that's worth separating. One is a consistent kernel<->user space interface, this is what Linus Torvalds considers high priority when he says, "Thou shalt not break userspace". This is what allows pretty much all distributions to replace the kernel that was shipped with the distribution with the latest upstream kernel. And this is something that in general doesn't work with *BSD systems. The second is application source-level compatibility, and this is what allows you to download some open source application, and recompile it on different Linux distributions, and it should Just Work. In practice this works for most Linux and *BSD users. And the third is application *binary* level compatibility. And this is what is important if you have some binary that you've downloaded, or some commerical application which you've purchased, and you want to run it on Linux distribution different from the one which is originally designed. Static linking solves most of the problems, but if the user needs to use proprietary/commercial binaries, if they stick to RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu/Debian, they will generally not have issues. - Ted