this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2025
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Back in the ancient pre-Internet days I worked for many years with a system called VMS made by Digital Equipment Corp (aka DEC), now long gone. VMS was a dream to use - every command and option was an actual word, and you could abbreviate commands and options any way you wanted, As long as you were unambiguous, it would figure out what you meant. So easy to learn, and felt so natural. Based on that alone I thought VMS would become more popular than Unix, with its cryptic commands, and those single-letter options that are sometimes the first letter of something obvious and other times seem totally random. But internally VMS wasn't structured as well - for example, piping output from one command to another was possible, but it wasn't geared for that like Unix is. There was also no free version of VMS, and it only ran on DEC hardware, so not that many people even knew about it. The dawn of Linux for PCs was essentially the nail in the coffin for VMS. But I do miss that CLI.