Linux Everywhere (Premium)

Bill Gates once remarked that Windows was the most versatile software that the world had ever seen. But one might much more easily make that case for Linux, a free and open source software stack that has proven far more adaptable to far more usage scenarios than Windows.

Yep, it's a Linux world. And we're just living in it.

A decade or so ago I was considering writing a book called Windows Everywhere. The title was an updated riff on the phrase "NT Everywhere," which I had secretly witnessed the NT team chanting at an internal meeting following the release Windows NT 5.0 Beta 2, in 1998. It was going to be the inside story about how Windows took over the personal computing world.

And for a few years after that milestone, it looked like Windows was set to do just that. Microsoft merged its consumer-oriented Windows 9x releases with NT, and it established Windows Server as the de facto platform for the Fortune 500, establishing its enterprise cred in the process. Microsoft applied the name "Windows" to just about anything it could, and some it shouldn't have. More important, it shut down any internal projects that would in any way threaten its core product and revenues earner. Windows everywhere, indeed.

Among the many successes of that era, it seemed, was the defeat of Linux on the PC desktop. Aside from a brief and temporary surge with netbooks, which Microsoft quickly defeated by creating the low-ball Windows XP Starter Edition, Linux never took off with end users in any meaningful way. And what was once seen as a very credible threat to Windows was minimized, and even openly mocked.

We were so naive.

I have two personal ties to Linux. The first came in the mid-1990s, when I was working in one of the computer labs at Scottsdale Community College in Scottsdale, Arizona. As a life-long tech enthusiast, I had long been curious about UNIX, though it was always some unattainable, high-end system. And then I heard about Linux, the free UNIX-like OS. Which was distributed in floppy disk-sized downloads.

Looking at an early version of Slackware Linux, which installed using a delightful, DOS-like text interface and then also ran mostly in a DOS-like text interface since the X-Window system was so buggy and hardware-specific, I wondered. Here was a system that could possibly do most of what Windows could do. There were free office productivity suites in the works, too, like StarOffice (later, OpenOffice). What if. What if those two products together could do even the top 20 percent of what users expected from Windows and Office? And do it for free.

What if.

My second major tie to Linux came in 2000. I was in Israel consulting with a company in Herzliya, and the CEO suddenly popped his head in the room. "You write about Microsoft, right?" he asked me. Yes. "Well, I have two guys in my office you need to speak with."

The two guys, as it turns out, were from a company called Mainsoft, which had been secretly commissioned ...

Gain unlimited access to Premium articles.

With technology shaping our everyday lives, how could we not dig deeper?

Thurrott Premium delivers an honest and thorough perspective about the technologies we use and rely on everyday. Discover deeper content as a Premium member.

Tagged with

Share post

Please check our Community Guidelines before commenting

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC