Comment by masfoobar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by masfoobar | Hacker News Reader

First they ignore you

.. then they laugh at you

.. then they fight you

.. then you win.

This comes from an old Red Hat Linux advert, likely way back to the late 1990s. At the end of the advert it says "you are here" which shows an old-style plane (before commercial) about to take off. Point is its just a matter of time it leaves the ground and "about to win"

Love or hate GNU/Linux, but it has been extremely successful and while not a winner in the desktop field - it has on servers!

Many people would never believe Linux getting the popularity it deserves. Of course things are changing - though slowly. Here we have Linux getting the love it needs as a serious gaming system anf Microsoft making some poor decision in the last couple of years especially with Windows.

Still a long way to go, especially breaking into the corporate world. Imagine - we could be seeing business laptops/desktops slowing gaining in Linux rather than Windows. That is not going to be easy. Again, it is not about Linux -- but the SOFTWARE. If the Office-space software and tools get more love in the Linux world, Microsoft start to focus away from their Windows platform and be purely about Software/Azure focus.

"You are here" -- getting closer off the ground!

FYI that quote originates neither from Red Hat, nor from Gandhi (the usual misattribution).

Consensus attribution appears to be: Union leader Nicholas Klein in 1914:

> And, my friends, in this story you have a history of this entire movement. First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you. And that, is what is going to happen to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.

Thumbs up!

Yes, I was aware this quote was from elsewhere... and likely inherits from others as well.

Thank you for sharing.

Just yesterday the news was Nvidia's personal AI supercomputer (on Linux). Today the news is about gaming and SteamOS. The "cloud" is already for decades overwhelmingly Linux. There are remarkable devices (pun) [1] based on Linux. Whether for fun or serious work, if we connect the dots the future is Linux, or at least Linux-like.

Yes, it is a painfully slow journey. People acting as individuals or in organizations have enormous inertia (which is not totally a bad thing- upgrading a Linux desktop is still a dance at the precipice). But the real cause is mostly the extreme centralization and suppression of competition in the broader tech space. This has not helped the adoption of mass-market oriented devices based on Linux. But slowly the wheels of computing history are turning...

[1] - https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable

Linux dominates supercomputers for a long time: https://itsfoss.com/linux-runs-top-supercomputers/

To the degree the phrase "a supercomputer in your pocket" stops being an empty marketing term and reflects real empowerment of users I would expect Linux to get ever more exposed to mass markets. But this development is predicated on non-technical users somehow becoming aware and valuing the agency and empowerment that a FOSS personal computing environment affords them.

These days the smartphone is the (very) Personal Computer for a lot of people.

Remember how Android is technically Linux ?

The risk here is for SteamOS to go the Android way...

but I have more faith in today's Valve than in Google of a ~decade ago.

At least for now, while Valve is still a private company and Gabe Newell is still leading it and still seems to be in good health and sound mind.

Sadly, this will probably only last for a couple of decades at best, but hopefully this is all the time that Linux (and libre software in general) needs.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5EkkMfjetEY&pp=ygUNVHJ1dGggaGF...

> They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Just because you are somewhere on that sequence, it doesn't mean you have any chance of moving forward. Also, most things don't follow those steps at all.

But yeah, those are the steps that "disruptive innovation" follow. The real kind, that the famous book was written about. Not the bullshit kind that people throw around to confuse others.

(Also, apparently, Carl Sagan wasn't much of a history nerd, just a physics one. I expected that phrase coming from somebody else. But well, at the time people knew very little about things that were not their specialty.)

They were correct to laugh at Columbus. He wanted to sail to India, everyone told him (correctly, because they weren't naive about the basic geography) that the distance was much too far. He lucked into finding an unknown landmass that wasn't India.

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