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Comment by yupyup | Hacker News Reader

Just an example of "Worse is better"?

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

I believe a fair amount of the Linux success story was available drivers. That is, as compared to any other unix like x86 OS. Even if they weren't the best drivers, you could get Linux up and running, and supporting your NIC, video card, etc.

That, and it was free (beer), and was unaffected by the AT&T vs BSD lawsuit.

Those seem important as well, but from my memory, weren't really differentiators after 1994 or so. I don't think the war was really over at that point.

I do remember having a much easier time getting Linux to work on various PCs than either Minix, FreeBSD, or NetBSD in the mid 90s. If I could pick all the components by hand, it wasn't an issue. But all that stuff was expensive, so Linux won out for me early because it mostly worked with whatever pile of motherboards, UARTS, used NICS, hdd driver boards, video cards, sound cards, etc, I had laying around.

And as it happens, I had some influence on corporate decisions sometime after all that. I knew that BSD was better in many ways. But I was also more comfortable/familiar with Linux.

Sound cards? In the mid 90s? Are you kidding me? Next up you will say that printers just worked. NICs, aye those did and that was glorious.

I said "mostly worked" across that broad list, relative to the competition in the same space.

Summarizing that as me saying "just worked" for everything isn't really fair.

It may not have been over, but that starting point allowed Linux to develop momentum as people worked on it while BSD languished in legal purgatory.

And come 94-95 the parts that would make up the LAMP came to be.

Possibly, but one that the recent generation of userspace devs are unwilling to acknowledge. Just watch them throw out workable, if gnarly, code in some attempt at reaching programming nirvana.

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