Linux and the 'clssic' computing world

[Tor Arntsen]

On Mon, 27 Sept 2021 at 23:31, Zane Healy via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> On Sep 27, 2021, at 2:15 PM, Nemo Nusquam via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> >
> > On 2021-09-27 10:07, Joshua Rice via cctalk wrote (in part):
> >>
> >> However, much of the "Linux" software is in fact POSIX software, and can quite easily be ported between Linux and other *NIX-likes, such as Solaris, macOS and the *BSD family.
> >
> > I cannot agree.  Many developers ensure that their software runs under their particular distribution and then call it POSIX. Porting to UNIX systems, such as Solaris or macOS, can be difficult and tedious.  (Of course, this is not a Linux issue.)
> >
> > N.
>
> This also sums up nicely what is Linux’s greatest failing.  Software vendors need “Linux”, and what they get is “Red Hat”, “SLES”, “Ubuntu”, etc. and as a result, the users suffer.  This is why most commercial apps target MacOS and Windows, or more often than not, just Windows.

Everything I personally develop for Linux will build on all Linux
distros, and also IRIX, Solaris, AIX, and, until recently, Tru64
(because I have access to those systems, except for Tru64 now). And to
some extent BSD variants.  It's not hard at all. And the company I
work for used to have build systems for all of the above until not
that far ago, but, as customers more and more move to Linux systems
the build support and tests have been removed for most of the rest
(AIX still hangs on by a thread). As for the various Linux distros,
the issue isn't really that they are that different, it's that they
don't have the same version of core software - in particular moving
targets like the C++ compiler (and this goes for various releases of
the same distro too).

I started testing Linux just for fun in early 1992 (because unlike
386BSD, Linux supported disk partitions, and that meant I could test
it on a 486 where the primary OS was OS/2).  When my X terminal then
broke down in April 1991 I replaced it with a 486 system running
Linux, kernel 0.95c. And I was an early tester for the ext file system
and X11. Even that early that Linux box was good enough to replace an
X terminal, even though most of the development I did was by accessing
a remote Sun box.  And I never looked back - it's *always* been "ready
for the desktop" for me.