"Distro" means "Distribution." It's so obvious to Linux users that defining the term seems unnecessary. But to an outsider, that simple definition helps a lot of understanding.
@@tonyramirez5707 I'm learning frontend and now I have to decide if I want to create a SPA or not. If so do I use CRA but miss out on SSR and use CSR instead. Or go with a framework and create MPA with SSR.
He was _perfectly_ happy using BK. [as was I, and thousands of other people] It was Andrew Tridgell that ruined it for everyone by continuing to dick around with cloning / reverse engineering bitkeeper (network protocol) even AFTER agreeing to stop. (I was never around Linus, but I'm told he was "pissed".) Kernel development slowed / stalled for a few months while Linus was forced to invent his own SCM. (no surprise git is very much like bitkeeper.) [There were lawyers involved. I was part of the evidence against him. Andrew was stomping on many a wiener. His "client" didn't act at all like a real "bk". When I set triggers to block his "client", he started mimicing the real "bk". The only way he'd know how is by using the real client -- a license violation -- or sniffing the traffic of someone else -- also illegal. Bitkeeper eventually took my trick to the extreme... "bkd" verifying the client's license.]
@@Ne-vc5pm I'm not Linus, Alan, or Greg, but yes, I was involved in kernel development at the time, but so were thousands of other people. Tridge's antics inconvenienced a great many people, including Linus who now had to go create his own SCM, and the entire linux kernel community for the months Linus was off dicking around with SCM's and not maintaining the kernel.
@@jfbeam wow thats so cool. But why Tridgell started to clone bit keeper? In wikipedia article its says that it was because some metadata was only available to commercial users. Is it true?
8:12 He was actually forced to create Git. What happened was that BitKeeper was made available as freeware to the Linux developer community, hedged around with a great deal of caveats. One of these was “no reverse engineering”. Torvalds felt for some reason he could agree to these terms on behalf of the entire Open Source community. So when Andrew Tridgell was commissioned (by the FSF, I think) to reverse-engineer BitKeeper’s formats and protocols, Torvalds ordered him to stop. To which he responded in the predictable way. So Larry McVoy gave notice of the termination of the BitKeeper licence. Torvalds went off to ruminate on things for a couple of weeks, and came back with the beginnings of Git. And the rest, as they say, is history.
@@jaimeduncan6167 whats wrong with copying other peoples ideas? Ideas are random, and nobody has the right to claim is as their own. if you are talking about labor, than you are right, even though it is inefficient, and we all will have to write our own TH-cam from scratch.
@@godfather7339 Ideas are not Radom, ideas requiere a lot of effort. For example any coding monkey can program an API, not everybody can design a good one. Any coding monkey can program an SQL parser, not everyone can design SQL. Any idiot can get windows 95 a program it for arm, and get an stupid phone with the windows interface running on an old. 320x200 miniature screen, not everyone can stop and think and create the Palm interface. In fact, you wanting to copy other people ideas show how valuable they are. Also ideas are risky, coding or building very little. Even today, decades later the ideas behind Unix are still guiding the technological progress. So much for random. Clearly ideas can't be protected forever, but they need to be protected for a while from people the subtract and copy.
@@Myrkvi_ holy shit lol! What happens if I send an e-mail with that e-mail address, from a supported provider, to someone with Gmail which can't understand such e-mail addresses?
Not 100% inaccurate. The word "Eunuch" is where "Unix" got its nsme. It was meant to be a more simple and paired down OS compared to a predecessor that was developed in the 60's.
True enough, but it gets complicated after that. The GPL logo which appears around 2:19 was made for version 3 of the license. But Linus disagreed with that version, and switched the license to Linux to be v2 only, so that it could not be released under GPL v3.
yeah, gnu's general public license is very permissive about using the softwares licensed with it for commercial purposes. That's part of the "freedom" in it (:
I love what Linus said about creating git; he used concurrent versions system (CVS) as an example what NOT to do, and when in doubt on a decision point, made the exact opposite decision from CVS. 😀
Finding right by excluding what's wrong and picking what's left? Sounds like a critical mind. To find a solution you first need to acknowledge being in an error. Have a nice day
That's funny. I wish someone had told me that about ten years ago. I delayed learning Git for a long time because my only previous experience with version control software was CVS. If someone had told me it was the opposite of CVS by design, I would have wised up sooner :)
@@sabin97 Cool. I'm just thinking that paradigm of going opposite of a mistake won't work universally. May be much more worthy when pivoting from big mistakes but there are still cases of good things with small problems & their possible solutions. But it's often easier to start fresh & discover unknown possibilities where nobody looks than fix some old complexity everyone is hitting their heads at without second thoughts.
@@ebrelus7687 when there are only two possible choices, and you know for a fact that one is wrong, you choose the other. it could ALSO be wrong, but if that's the case then it means there's no right choice, because both are wrong. there are design decisions that are unavoidable. you cant simply create something magical. linus didnt just get the source code of cvs and went on to change everything. he started out fresh. and in binary decisions, he made the choice opposite to what cvs did. yeah. he was creating a version control system. A LOT of the design decisions are the same. because it's the same sort of thing.
Linus saying he didn't want to call it Linux because it was quite egotistical is quite funny. I wonder if his ego grew because he yells at people in emails enough that it makes news sometimes. When speaking on video he seems quite nice though.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!
@Yes Yes Some do, but I wont chastise anyone for calling Linux mint..just Linux though...any more or less for the fact that I won't be rude for someone calling my Civic si just a car. (shrugs)
Correction 0:49 - "Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were creating the Unix operating system". Ken Thompson wrote the (original) operating system solo in 3 weeks ... in assembly. He thought he was going to be be fired for doing so, because Bell Labs was told not to work on operating systems anymore. A couple years later Dennis Ritchie invented C (built on top of Ken's own language, B), Ken then tried rewriting Unix in C a couple of times, providing feedback about the language to Dennis - He didn't like using the language until Dennis added structures. Because C and Unix were both invented at Bell Labs, and were (after a few years) closely entwined, lots of people seem to confuse who invented what, and sadly often leave out how significant Ken's contribution was.
@@Ryan-in3ot Yeah, I think so. Ken spoke very highly of him in one of his interviews, saying exactly that. However, I haven't been able to find out anything about him. Do you have any links?
@@elliott8175 There is a talk about the origin of Unix where he, Kernighan, and others are featured. th-cam.com/video/l03CF9_078I/w-d-xo.html And I have seen him at other such talks (online, not in person)
5:38 That “security” aspect was a bit of a joke in the early days, when Red Hat installers tended to load on everything by default. A client of mine got hacked through a vulnerability in the SunRPC service, which we weren’t even using.
If Linux gave up on this splitting thing 15 years ago, it would have been the most populous operating system on PC's. But no, every bored nerd thinks he can do better. Meanwhile Microshit laughs all the way to the bank.
@@Deontjie I mostly disagree. Early Linux was not a legitimate competitor to early windows, which is when windows became the default. And nowadays Linux is superior to windows because of it's splits. It allowed and continues to allow devs an arena that rewards performance improvements and alternative approaches that often wind up superior then the predecessors. Yes, all of the distros are a bit overwhelming to the new-to-linux, but they have enabled Linux to become head and shoulders above any other OS.
@@benruss4130 In addition, there are a lot of projects and tools being worked on nowadays, like Flatpak, Pipewire, etc., that aim to make Linux application development more distro-agnostic and accessible. It's not 100% there yet, but I feel like we're surely getting closer by the day :)
You should do more of these historical topics. I think people really dig it and I do so too. There are so many projects and great people behind them and amazing stories from the history of technology that deserve to be known.
Yes! Im a computer science major and stumbled onto this because my teacher wants us to learn about the history. stumbling onto this video, its really so cool
The community of Linux is so diverse that almost any discussion can turn controversial. The way you covered this topic is no less of an artistic genius! I use arch btw
I use Pop_OS, and every computer I own runs some kind of Ubuntu. It is a very diverse community indeed, ranging from random people who want A Minecraft server (that's how I started) to people who commit to the kernel regularily(not me lol, I barely know C or C++)
2:18 this would be the biggest blunder in this video according to me. Linux is released under GPL2 and not 3. When GPL3 was released torvalds clearly rejected upgrading to GPL3 because he doesn't agree with the license.
This video man ... your channel is awesome! Stopped multiple times in between to study the amazing info graphics! Keep up the great work, I love your channel and your focus on intermediate to advanced programmers!
i like his channel especially the "100 seconds" series. Many people say that he teaches too fast in them but that's not the point. "100 second" series is not supposed teach you a language. It's to teach you what language to learn.
Linux has been a joy since I first installed Slackware on my 486DX2-66. I've dabbled with most major distros, and enjoyed the puzzle of getting cd-roms, printers, and sound cards to work back in the '90s and '00s. I used to have to compile a custom kernel to enable a Panasonic cd-rom! Fun times.
*mentions the fact that Linus created git in passing* "Like yeah man, I was not liking this software. So I built one of the biggest version control systems just out of spite. Y'know, everyday things"
@@softwarelivre2389 His deno presentation was also funny as hell, demonstrating all the gripes that many of us subconsciously or not came up with and had to train our brains to accept, just because javascript then was less mature than today's version of the language. Plus, the moment it all breaks down when he almost started cursing at some faults of his own creation and the audience simply applauded because they finally had the official approval to voice their angst against theme same faults... priceless :)
I started using GNU/Linux in 2007, and I never looked back. My first distro was Aurox, which I only used for few weeks. Then there was the mighty Ubuntu 7.04 and few versions after that. However, my life has truly changed when I started using Debian. Since 2010, all my computers used Debian and I absolutely love it till today. It only gets better. I was very fortunate to always be allowed using Linux at work.
Ah, mighty 7.04 Feisty Fawn. My first distro and the one that encouraged me to move from Windows. Was using Ubuntu until 10.04 when Canonical decided they wanna be a new Apple and moved window buttons to the left side. Lucid Lynx forced me to learn how to install Debian and today, twelve years later, I'm still in love with Debian.
This video is actually a very good, short, and easy to understand introduction to linux. I think I'm gonna send this to anyone that asks me what linux is.
Well if a University student created an operating system back then and expected it to be as big as Windows 3.10, MacOS, OS/2, the awaited Windows NT and everything else they would've laughed at him
This video was incredible and so insightful! This is a brilliant summary of the story of linux and really helped highlight why linux and the distros are the way they are! Another quality video sir!
Fireship: There are 2 Linux families that came out in the early 2000s that are focused on simplicity, performance, and minimalism *Ah yes, Gen Z distros*
Yeah, a distro is there so you can open some application on it and do some work. Fighting over tools is stupid if you're not gonna use the tool to build something.
There is a great book that Linus Torvalds co-authored called "Just for Fun: a story of an accidental revolution" - that describes early days of Linux and how that later influenced Torvald's life. A super well written book that is not technical at all.
3:40 thanks for having suse in the list. However: Suse parted ways with Slackware in the 1990s, moved over to become their own thing from scratch and be rpm packaged. And _open_SUSE, the step of going from in house development to an open community started only 2004.
Not something many people in the Linux community are likely to admit to, but a lot of the different distros have come about because people thought their way was better and that that required a whole new distro. Little of it is about actual needs.
@1:06 Best part of the video explaining the origin of it all in operating systems. And I am grateful to Stallman for GNU (and previously his fight against the corporation) and Torvalds for Linux because without them, we would be stuck in a nightmarish computer world controlled by Microsoft/Sun/IBM with 0 innovation for the people - well, if Apple would have had a better follow up of its Apple II we might have went through but the world wouldn't be as advanced computing-wise as it is today.
I think that in truth, the BSD's will keeping existing in anyway, and GNU is not the ideal, like it's very far from beeing 100% POSIX, Busybox and MUSL LibC is way better, but not the ideal too. POSIX should be a manual to write a UNIX-based OS.
I've been into Linux and the free software community for many years now. Honestly, this was one of the best intros to "What the f*** is Linux?" that I've seen. Thanks Fireship.
Awesome video dude, you're killing it. I really enjoyed placing my entry to the Linux world on the greater timeline, if only I knew when I tried out feisty (7.04) it would change my live forever!
when i switched to linux first i thought it was crazy how many different distros there were. it was quite overwhleming trying to choose one. but it makes total sense to me now that there is a different distro for every type of use case and for different philiosphies, and its actually more crazy that companies microsoft or apple think they can make a single OS that will suit billions of people
7:35 "... but in reality, it's the polar opposite [of Communism] and the Free Market at its finest" This is only true if its taken as a play on words: "Free" as in software, not "Free" as in deregulation. Markets fundamentally regulate property and ownership: who owns what and under what conditions. The "Free" Market refers to an unregulated market where ownership is determined by whichever private entity has the most power to enforce their will. Therefore, a free market seeks to privatize as much Intellectual Property as possible, mainly because owning ideas is a form of power over people (thought control, limiting the ability to express themselves), but also because requiring people to go through you to meet their specific needs would generate more revenue (secondary resources that become property) than letting some other private entities use "your" ideas to cater to those people's needs. Free Software directly spits in the face of this and says "these ideas are owned by the entire community, including end users who don't even contribute to the project, and no singular entity may have total control over it." The term 'Communist' is appropriate because what I just described is communal ownership (the likes of which a communist market functions on), regardless of the intentions of those using it.
Not quite so, its true that there is no gui after install but a lot of necessary packages are already there. sudo -S pacman xf86-video-amdgpu xorg-server xorg-xinit dwm. Will give me working gui. (I know about compiling dwm from source lol but just for example).
There are distros which actually more minimal then arch. Arch is more of a meme nowadays. Tons of install videos and even copy and paste wiki. No hate for arch tho. Grate distro, I use it for my laptop.
I love linux, when windows 10 released it totally tanked my old laptop, so I upgraded computers and put mint on my old laptop, it runs great and my son uses it
I'm 29 years old and what's amazing with this is that most of these awesome people from the beginning at Bell Labs/AT&T, Ken Thompson, Lorinda Cherry, Brian Kerningham, etc. then afterwards people like Linus Torvals, Richard Stallman are still alive today (sadly not Ian Murdock, but he did not die of old age, and Dennis Ritchie), even if to younger conmputer science enthusiasts today, it feels like the history of mankind all the way from prehistoric times, all of this happened incredibly fast. It's so awesome that even if it feels like old software if you would boot up the first versions of GNU/Debian, etc, it's the same commands that you run today, with some updates of course, but most of it looks the same. I'm so thankful for all of their code that I use everyday for free, especially for those who intended it to be free and open source software from the beginning. To me, they are legends, we will always remember their names, but we should not forget that behind the big names, there are thousands of mostly anonymous FOSS projects contributors who are awesome too! I believe GNU/Linux systems will continue to improve (almost) forever.
And now that licensed OS vendors like Microsoft, Apple and Google are trying to milk more and more cash from their users using software as a service licences and/or data collection, FOSS OSes might become even more popular even to mainstream users. Windows was so easy to install back in the XP days, now I have to unplug the router so I can get the option to create a local account and not an online account, and find opt-out options of each GPS data collection and Cortana stuff that I don't need or want. Then I have to uninstall trial versions of software I never asked for, which were only previously found on OEM installs... I have many PCs, Windows, Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, but I only keep Windows because I can't run certain games on GNU/Linux...
I switched to Ubuntu 20.04 from Windows 10 just a few months back. Honestly, that was the best decision of my life. The experience is really amazing. And it is damn easy to do any kind of programming in Linux. A million thanks to Linus Torvalds and the entire open source community. And thanks for making this video. It was fun to watch.
@6:26 Storage is cheap and those extra features have a negligible impact on performance, unless you run a potato. Bloat is basically the price of convenience. It makes the system more complex, not the life. 😊
I've only tried once to install it in VirtualBox... I've been stuck as to which key selects the needed packages (later found out it's the spacebar, I think). And as a newbie Linux user how the hell would I know what I need?! Most of those packages meant nothing to me back then... Haven't tried it ever since... but I'm looking for a good rolling release, so I might give a spin to one of the Arch-based distros, like Garuda.
@@MetalTrabant Honestly, if you're a newbie, you better stick to one of the popular distros like Linux Mint or Ubuntu, unless you're a masochist, that is.
i switched from win10 to Manjaro for my workstation half a year ago and yes there is a learning curve. however i don't think i would be able to switch back because most things on linux just make sense compared to win10
Thank god I know this OS since 14, and Im 15 heh, I helped someone who was 11 years wanted to install arch on his computer so helped him. i wish all people even the "non-techy" ones try it out
@@hariranormal5584 have been using since when I was 13, now I'm 17 and it was totally worth learning, fixing problems, reading articles, being a part of this community and so on. Trust me, even if you don't work in IT, all of these experiences and ideas (such as foss, collaboration, etc) are gonna influence in how you use and spread your knowledge to make great things
Carlos Eduardo Alvarez I am generally interested in Hardware, Computer engineering and so on (mostly hardware, not much software) and a bit of networking It's still useful to have Sys'admin'ing skills tho, I manage a few servers on the cloud owned by friends and stuff. Pretty fun thing to do! 😛 We were running centos, but because its updates are now limited and is gonna go EOL in a few months, we migrated to ubuntu (well I don't like ubuntu, friends forced me for getting ubuntu so i just did it)
March 22, 2021 Fireship Released a video "Why so many distros? The Weird History of Linux". Feb 19, 2022, me watching the same video in my Linux. This video was encouraging
Just want to sprinkle a bit of information: in addition to independent distros, there is Void Linux, which functions like Arch, but has its own package manager (xbps), and does not use systemd, bur rather runit.
Libre software is literally the opposite of free market relations considering it rejects private and intellectual property rights. It would be much more accurate to call it communistic since it's free association among free producers (which is why it makes sense that e.g. RMS is a socialist)
Without Richard Stallman's GNU project GNU/Linux would not exist as we know it. Stallman did two things. He created Copyleft and was instrumental in getting built all of the rest of the things you need to make a kernel actually useful. Without either of those you don't have Linux.
I would disagree with the "without either of those" - there was another competing set of programs that could've (and have at various times) been used instead of GNU - and that is BSD. Not to dismiss GNU (which imho is just as impressive an accomplishment) - but the tools are not unique.
"Distro" means "Distribution."
It's so obvious to Linux users that defining the term seems unnecessary. But to an outsider, that simple definition helps a lot of understanding.
Most of the difficulty from learning IT comes from everything being abbreviated fight me!
@@tonyramirez5707 why should i fight a fact =V
@@tonyramirez5707 facts
@@tonyramirez5707 I'm learning frontend and now I have to decide if I want to create a SPA or not. If so do I use CRA but miss out on SSR and use CSR instead. Or go with a framework and create MPA with SSR.
To be fair, what else could it mean? The meaning can be inferred from context alone.
8:11 " He created git!" - Lol why not right
When it came to version control controversy Linus said "Fine I'll do it myself"
He was _perfectly_ happy using BK. [as was I, and thousands of other people] It was Andrew Tridgell that ruined it for everyone by continuing to dick around with cloning / reverse engineering bitkeeper (network protocol) even AFTER agreeing to stop. (I was never around Linus, but I'm told he was "pissed".) Kernel development slowed / stalled for a few months while Linus was forced to invent his own SCM. (no surprise git is very much like bitkeeper.)
[There were lawyers involved. I was part of the evidence against him. Andrew was stomping on many a wiener. His "client" didn't act at all like a real "bk". When I set triggers to block his "client", he started mimicing the real "bk". The only way he'd know how is by using the real client -- a license violation -- or sniffing the traffic of someone else -- also illegal. Bitkeeper eventually took my trick to the extreme... "bkd" verifying the client's license.]
@@jfbeam screw that, I'm glad git was made.
@@jfbeamwait, were you involved in kernel dev?
@@Ne-vc5pm I'm not Linus, Alan, or Greg, but yes, I was involved in kernel development at the time, but so were thousands of other people. Tridge's antics inconvenienced a great many people, including Linus who now had to go create his own SCM, and the entire linux kernel community for the months Linus was off dicking around with SCM's and not maintaining the kernel.
@@jfbeam wow thats so cool. But why Tridgell started to clone bit keeper? In wikipedia article its says that it was because some metadata was only available to commercial users. Is it true?
8:12 He was actually forced to create Git. What happened was that BitKeeper was made available as freeware to the Linux developer community, hedged around with a great deal of caveats. One of these was “no reverse engineering”. Torvalds felt for some reason he could agree to these terms on behalf of the entire Open Source community. So when Andrew Tridgell was commissioned (by the FSF, I think) to reverse-engineer BitKeeper’s formats and protocols, Torvalds ordered him to stop. To which he responded in the predictable way. So Larry McVoy gave notice of the termination of the BitKeeper licence. Torvalds went off to ruminate on things for a couple of weeks, and came back with the beginnings of Git.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Yep pretty good summary. There is always someone that believes they have the right to copy other people ideas, even if there is a accord not to do so.
Remind me
@@jaimeduncan6167 whats wrong with copying other peoples ideas? Ideas are random, and nobody has the right to claim is as their own.
if you are talking about labor, than you are right, even though it is inefficient, and we all will have to write our own TH-cam from scratch.
@@godfather7339 Ideas are not Radom, ideas requiere a lot of effort. For example any coding monkey can program an API, not everybody can design a good one. Any coding monkey can program an SQL parser, not everyone can design SQL. Any idiot can get windows 95 a program it for arm, and get an stupid phone with the windows interface running on an old. 320x200 miniature screen, not everyone can stop and think and create the Palm interface. In fact, you wanting to copy other people ideas show how valuable they are. Also ideas are risky, coding or building very little. Even today, decades later the ideas behind Unix are still guiding the technological progress. So much for random. Clearly ideas can't be protected forever, but they need to be protected for a while from people the subtract and copy.
@@jaimeduncan6167 ideas are not property. You can’t (ethically) own an idea. What happens when someone else stumbles on “your” idea independently?
Linus created this as a hobby. While I can't even remember basic email pattern for regular expressions
Don’t use an RE to parse e-mail addresses.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Why not?
@@Myrkvi_ holy shit lol! What happens if I send an e-mail with that e-mail address, from a supported provider, to someone with Gmail which can't understand such e-mail addresses?
You don't have to so badly
RE sucks bruh.
Gotta love the subtitles sometimes. "led to a period known as the eunuchs wars"
😂
Not 100% inaccurate. The word "Eunuch" is where "Unix" got its nsme. It was meant to be a more simple and paired down OS compared to a predecessor that was developed in the 60's.
@@perforongo9078 I couldn't find any link to the word "eunuch", just that Unix was a play on "Multics".
1:00
People that are into tech are often Eunuchs tho, we are unable to get a girlfriend so it's accurate. Intelligence is the best birth control
And remember kids: "Free" is about "freedom", not price
Depends on the context, in the case of distros it's usually both (with some exceptions of course).
True enough, but it gets complicated after that. The GPL logo which appears around 2:19 was made for version 3 of the license. But Linus disagreed with that version, and switched the license to Linux to be v2 only, so that it could not be released under GPL v3.
yeah, gnu's general public license is very permissive about using the softwares licensed with it for commercial purposes. That's part of the "freedom" in it (:
You do not get freedom with sex.
@@Sitwayen maybe you are in a toxic relationship
This moment when you realize, that this legend create a second project worth millions, only for manage his first big project worth millions
*billions ...? Considering a lot of world depends on it.
lol
@@VivekYadav-ds8oz 1000 million = 1 billion so I think saying "millions" can also mean "billions"
@@namesurname6294 bruh
@@namesurname6294 that’s like saying tens of dollars can mean a trillion dollars because 100,000,000,000 tens == 1 trillion.
Watching it from a GNU/Linux based OS, a big respect goes to you, bro
Watching it from Arch btw
Watched on android so I count as well I guess
@@frenches1995 that's probably his case too. He's a poseur.
Android isn't GNU/Linux, it uses the Linux kernel but doesn't have the GNU components
@@Windfarmer I think it does. If you install termux you can use those programs
I love what Linus said about creating git; he used concurrent versions system (CVS) as an example what NOT to do, and when in doubt on a decision point, made the exact opposite decision from CVS. 😀
Finding right by excluding what's wrong and picking what's left? Sounds like a critical mind. To find a solution you first need to acknowledge being in an error. Have a nice day
That's funny. I wish someone had told me that about ten years ago. I delayed learning Git for a long time because my only previous experience with version control software was CVS. If someone had told me it was the opposite of CVS by design, I would have wised up sooner :)
@@ebrelus7687
yeah. cvs was the error.
@@sabin97 Cool. I'm just thinking that paradigm of going opposite of a mistake won't work universally. May be much more worthy when pivoting from big mistakes but there are still cases of good things with small problems & their possible solutions.
But it's often easier to start fresh & discover unknown possibilities where nobody looks than fix some old complexity everyone is hitting their heads at without second thoughts.
@@ebrelus7687 when there are only two possible choices, and you know for a fact that one is wrong, you choose the other. it could ALSO be wrong, but if that's the case then it means there's no right choice, because both are wrong.
there are design decisions that are unavoidable.
you cant simply create something magical.
linus didnt just get the source code of cvs and went on to change everything.
he started out fresh.
and in binary decisions, he made the choice opposite to what cvs did.
yeah. he was creating a version control system.
A LOT of the design decisions are the same. because it's the same sort of thing.
Weaponized assault Penguin is an accurate representation of linux community
WAP
Linus saying he didn't want to call it Linux because it was quite egotistical is quite funny. I wonder if his ego grew because he yells at people in emails enough that it makes news sometimes.
When speaking on video he seems quite nice though.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!
@Yes Yes Some do, but I wont chastise anyone for calling Linux mint..just Linux though...any more or less for the fact that I won't be rude for someone calling my Civic si just a car. (shrugs)
@Yes Yes It's a copypasta
Correction 0:49 - "Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were creating the Unix operating system".
Ken Thompson wrote the (original) operating system solo in 3 weeks ... in assembly. He thought he was going to be be fired for doing so, because Bell Labs was told not to work on operating systems anymore. A couple years later Dennis Ritchie invented C (built on top of Ken's own language, B), Ken then tried rewriting Unix in C a couple of times, providing feedback about the language to Dennis - He didn't like using the language until Dennis added structures.
Because C and Unix were both invented at Bell Labs, and were (after a few years) closely entwined, lots of people seem to confuse who invented what, and sadly often leave out how significant Ken's contribution was.
the real one left out is Doug McIlroy
@@Ryan-in3ot Yeah, I think so. Ken spoke very highly of him in one of his interviews, saying exactly that. However, I haven't been able to find out anything about him. Do you have any links?
@@elliott8175 There is a talk about the origin of Unix where he, Kernighan, and others are featured. th-cam.com/video/l03CF9_078I/w-d-xo.html
And I have seen him at other such talks (online, not in person)
Next video idea: filesystems exFAT, EXT4, FAT32, NTFS, etc
I really want to see this video
Yes
yes please
Gary Explains did a video about this recently. But I'd still love to see one here.
YES!
Dennis Richie,
Ken Thompson,
Richard Stallman,
Linus Torvalds
Legends that created the heart(engine) of computer programming.
how about bill gates and steve jobs?
@@miladini1 no lol. theyre barely even programmers.
@@miladini1 dennis richie and ken tompson created the c programming langyage and unix. Linux , windows and macos are built with c .
@@andreicapi3535 that's right. But if we wanna credit Torvalds, then I guess Gates and Jobs also equally if not more deserve respect.
@@miladini1should've also credited Wozniak then, he is the one who actually designed and created early Apple machines.
"won't be a big professional thing"
lol no
The community: "I'm about to build this man's whole career"
@@ClifffSVK But actually they started it LOL
Narrator: It did. It was brutal.
This comment has 666 likes
Hobby programmers on the way to make every backbone important code for the industry:
5:38 That “security” aspect was a bit of a joke in the early days, when Red Hat installers tended to load on everything by default. A client of mine got hacked through a vulnerability in the SunRPC service, which we weren’t even using.
Pls next : Story of git !
True, would be a great video, would also want to know about things like subversion and mercurial
+1
bump
Bamp
check the commits
SteamOS is actually Arch these days. A couple years back Valve split to Arch, and that was *before* this video was made.
If Linux gave up on this splitting thing 15 years ago, it would have been the most populous operating system on PC's. But no, every bored nerd thinks he can do better. Meanwhile Microshit laughs all the way to the bank.
@@Deontjie I mostly disagree. Early Linux was not a legitimate competitor to early windows, which is when windows became the default. And nowadays Linux is superior to windows because of it's splits. It allowed and continues to allow devs an arena that rewards performance improvements and alternative approaches that often wind up superior then the predecessors. Yes, all of the distros are a bit overwhelming to the new-to-linux, but they have enabled Linux to become head and shoulders above any other OS.
@@benruss4130 In addition, there are a lot of projects and tools being worked on nowadays, like Flatpak, Pipewire, etc., that aim to make Linux application development more distro-agnostic and accessible. It's not 100% there yet, but I feel like we're surely getting closer by the day :)
Seriously, you did a hard work on making this video!
Simple animations. Wikipedia info...lo
@@JosueRodriguez08 "Simple" animations which surely took dozens of hours in total.
You should do more of these historical topics. I think people really dig it and I do so too. There are so many projects and great people behind them and amazing stories from the history of technology that deserve to be known.
Yes! Im a computer science major and stumbled onto this because my teacher wants us to learn about the history. stumbling onto this video, its really so cool
The community of Linux is so diverse that almost any discussion can turn controversial. The way you covered this topic is no less of an artistic genius!
I use arch btw
What is controversial ? All distros are welcome
...to try (and fail) to be as good as debian :D
@@jousis_ bad* shitian* hamgermbur*
I use Pop_OS, and every computer I own runs some kind of Ubuntu.
It is a very diverse community indeed, ranging from random people who want A Minecraft server (that's how I started) to people who commit to the kernel regularily(not me lol, I barely know C or C++)
what's an arch
average alpine enjoyer
2:18 this would be the biggest blunder in this video according to me. Linux is released under GPL2 and not 3. When GPL3 was released torvalds clearly rejected upgrading to GPL3 because he doesn't agree with the license.
Thanks for making Linux videos
Bhai maine tujhe kahi dekha hai
@@soham7510 he has a yt channel of his own - shailesh explains.
@@sriansuchoudhary916 okay, maybe then
Thank you for giving proper credit to Stallman and the GNU Project, a lot of people overlook that.
This video man ... your channel is awesome! Stopped multiple times in between to study the amazing info graphics! Keep up the great work, I love your channel and your focus on intermediate to advanced programmers!
i like his channel especially the "100 seconds" series. Many people say that he teaches too fast in them but that's not the point. "100 second" series is not supposed teach you a language. It's to teach you what language to learn.
Linux has been a joy since I first installed Slackware on my 486DX2-66. I've dabbled with most major distros, and enjoyed the puzzle of getting cd-roms, printers, and sound cards to work back in the '90s and '00s. I used to have to compile a custom kernel to enable a Panasonic cd-rom! Fun times.
*mentions the fact that Linus created git in passing*
"Like yeah man, I was not liking this software. So I built one of the biggest version control systems just out of spite. Y'know, everyday things"
Just like Ryan Dahl "yeah, and then I create Node whatever" then creating Deno
@@softwarelivre2389 His deno presentation was also funny as hell, demonstrating all the gripes that many of us subconsciously or not came up with and had to train our brains to accept, just because javascript then was less mature than today's version of the language. Plus, the moment it all breaks down when he almost started cursing at some faults of his own creation and the audience simply applauded because they finally had the official approval to voice their angst against theme same faults... priceless :)
I started using GNU/Linux in 2007, and I never looked back. My first distro was Aurox, which I only used for few weeks. Then there was the mighty Ubuntu 7.04 and few versions after that. However, my life has truly changed when I started using Debian. Since 2010, all my computers used Debian and I absolutely love it till today. It only gets better. I was very fortunate to always be allowed using Linux at work.
Ah, mighty 7.04 Feisty Fawn. My first distro and the one that encouraged me to move from Windows. Was using Ubuntu until 10.04 when Canonical decided they wanna be a new Apple and moved window buttons to the left side. Lucid Lynx forced me to learn how to install Debian and today, twelve years later, I'm still in love with Debian.
@Mr. Unknown He only tried some ancient version which was difficult to instal and gave up.
"While grandpa was dropping acid at Woodstock" - lines I never thought I'd heard in a developer video🤣
*while, but yeah, no, a lot of software guys like weed, psychedelics, at least ones that I personally know.
@@dontbotherreading We devs stay away from hallucinogenics, we head straight for the psychostimulant stuff, like Ritalin and Adderall 😜
@@Hobbitstomper why not both
@@hexerei02021 You can, but only once.
@@VivekYadav-ds8oz Human body can take a lot more than that.
This video is actually a very good, short, and easy to understand introduction to linux. I think I'm gonna send this to anyone that asks me what linux is.
"Some cars are designed to go fast...", of all F1 cars shows Ferrari.
It looked fast... Apparently it's not the best F1 car?
@@Fireship Well...it's complicated. Let's say that it's not in the front row!
(Senpai noticed me! 🤩)
S🅱️innala
MERCEDES!!!!!
@@Fireship Not last year... Last year was one of their worst years.
This is such a helpful video, for beginners or for anyone that is interested about Linux, thanks for all the hardwork.
Another amazing one! Love this history
0:06 "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)" Dear Lord this (positive) irony.
Well if a University student created an operating system back then and expected it to be as big as Windows 3.10, MacOS, OS/2, the awaited Windows NT and everything else they would've laughed at him
This video was incredible and so insightful! This is a brilliant summary of the story of linux and really helped highlight why linux and the distros are the way they are! Another quality video sir!
Fireship: There are 2 Linux families that came out in the early 2000s that are focused on simplicity, performance, and minimalism
*Ah yes, Gen Z distros*
Distro doesn't matter as long as you do something worthy in your life
And you have a fedora profile picture... xD
You words hit me hard! Became lazy these days!
Yeah, a distro is there so you can open some application on it and do some work. Fighting over tools is stupid if you're not gonna use the tool to build something.
Operating System as well :)
Says the guy with a fedora profile picture
There is a great book that Linus Torvalds co-authored called "Just for Fun: a story of an accidental revolution" - that describes early days of Linux and how that later influenced Torvald's life. A super well written book that is not technical at all.
0:35 great words by great man
3:40 thanks for having suse in the list. However: Suse parted ways with Slackware in the 1990s, moved over to become their own thing from scratch and be rpm packaged. And _open_SUSE, the step of going from in house development to an open community started only 2004.
Every day I see more and more Linux content from various TH-cam channels. Really cool to see the community grow
Not something many people in the Linux community are likely to admit to, but a lot of the different distros have come about because people thought their way was better and that that required a whole new distro. Little of it is about actual needs.
为什么复盖我的谷歌帐户冒充我上线
ends justify means
As a linux user I don't think any of us wouldn't admit to thinking their way is better 😂
Wisdom:
"It's better when it's free. :P" ❤️
I agree 😬
not in every case
@@hmm7458 free headset noises intensifies
Yeah, but it also costs you much more if it's free...
Well for many software companies and vendors if it's free then you're the product so you need to dig a little more onto that.
@@Ometecuhtlitrue. The good thing is that here the cost is not monetary but a social cost about talking about Linux lol
@1:06 Best part of the video explaining the origin of it all in operating systems. And I am grateful to Stallman for GNU (and previously his fight against the corporation) and Torvalds for Linux because without them, we would be stuck in a nightmarish computer world controlled by Microsoft/Sun/IBM with 0 innovation for the people - well, if Apple would have had a better follow up of its Apple II we might have went through but the world wouldn't be as advanced computing-wise as it is today.
I've always asked myself whether it is the culture of software development that created GNU or is it GNU that spawned the culture of software.
I think that in truth, the BSD's will keeping existing in anyway, and GNU is not the ideal, like it's very far from beeing 100% POSIX, Busybox and MUSL LibC is way better, but not the ideal too. POSIX should be a manual to write a UNIX-based OS.
4:02 That's hilariously genius
This Linus guy is a legend. Didn't even know we have git thanks to him.
Same here
Man you are uploading daily? Awesome content as always 😃
I've been into Linux and the free software community for many years now. Honestly, this was one of the best intros to "What the f*** is Linux?" that I've seen. Thanks Fireship.
Loving the spotlight on Linux!
I'm gonna show this to my buddy who is skeptical about Linux AND Communsim ;) :> Thanks for this !
Awesome video dude, you're killing it. I really enjoyed placing my entry to the Linux world on the greater timeline, if only I knew when I tried out feisty (7.04) it would change my live forever!
6:45 Thumbs up for the visualisation of "rolling release" :)
Linux from scratch in 100 seconds?
I can't download all the sources in 100 seconds, lol!
You can do LFS in 2 hours if you have the sources pre downloaded
when i switched to linux first i thought it was crazy how many different distros there were. it was quite overwhleming trying to choose one. but it makes total sense to me now that there is a different distro for every type of use case and for different philiosphies, and its actually more crazy that companies microsoft or apple think they can make a single OS that will suit billions of people
I've been waiting for this so eagerly since yesterday when you told us this would be coming!
7:35 "... but in reality, it's the polar opposite [of Communism] and the Free Market at its finest"
This is only true if its taken as a play on words: "Free" as in software, not "Free" as in deregulation.
Markets fundamentally regulate property and ownership: who owns what and under what conditions. The "Free" Market refers to an unregulated market where ownership is determined by whichever private entity has the most power to enforce their will. Therefore, a free market seeks to privatize as much Intellectual Property as possible, mainly because owning ideas is a form of power over people (thought control, limiting the ability to express themselves), but also because requiring people to go through you to meet their specific needs would generate more revenue (secondary resources that become property) than letting some other private entities use "your" ideas to cater to those people's needs.
Free Software directly spits in the face of this and says "these ideas are owned by the entire community, including end users who don't even contribute to the project, and no singular entity may have total control over it." The term 'Communist' is appropriate because what I just described is communal ownership (the likes of which a communist market functions on), regardless of the intentions of those using it.
Yeah he just had to throw it in there lol
techbros when they realize FOSS is actually decomodification rather than free market capitalist
The free market gave us Microsoft. 'Nuff said.
03:00 I refuse to believe that you couldn't find a higher resolution of the GNOME logo than that half-hearted excuse of a pixelated mess!! haha :D
gnome doesn't deserve any better
@@hammadulhaq1640 i unfortunately had to use it cause cinnamon wouldn't run on my old machine...
@@hammadulhaq1640 Gnome is awesome.
@@noahluppe what about xfce??
@@maskedredstonerproz it was a Linux mint system and it has been quite a while, wasn't into Linux back then and just used what worked for me
i don't think showing a GPL3 image at 2:15 is the best given how much Linus is against using this version of GPL
Calling Arch Linux simple and minimalistic is true for power user, but it is quite misleading for layman.
"Empty" or "Blank" might be more descriptive terms.
Arch is simple to the computer because it includes nothing, not to the user who needs to get that shit running.
More like an empty space rather than "minimalistic"
Not quite so, its true that there is no gui after install but a lot of necessary packages are already there. sudo -S pacman xf86-video-amdgpu xorg-server xorg-xinit dwm. Will give me working gui. (I know about compiling dwm from source lol but just for example).
There are distros which actually more minimal then arch. Arch is more of a meme nowadays. Tons of install videos and even copy and paste wiki. No hate for arch tho. Grate distro, I use it for my laptop.
Wonderfully concise, comprehensive and historically accurate. THANK YOU!
7:15
Some cars are designed to go fast
>Shows a ferrari xd
yeah.. 2020 was a painful to watch season :'(
this was actually very comprehensive 💪🙏
7:17 Some cars are designed to be fast : *Shows a picture of a completely red tractor*
Copy, we're looking into it. Slow button on, Slow button on.
I freaking loving this channel what a video bro... Keep it up I am going to share this channel to my friends and family.. Amazing channel...
I love linux, when windows 10 released it totally tanked my old laptop, so I upgraded computers and put mint on my old laptop, it runs great and my son uses it
I'm 29 years old and what's amazing with this is that most of these awesome people from the beginning at Bell Labs/AT&T, Ken Thompson, Lorinda Cherry, Brian Kerningham, etc. then afterwards people like Linus Torvals, Richard Stallman are still alive today (sadly not Ian Murdock, but he did not die of old age, and Dennis Ritchie), even if to younger conmputer science enthusiasts today, it feels like the history of mankind all the way from prehistoric times, all of this happened incredibly fast.
It's so awesome that even if it feels like old software if you would boot up the first versions of GNU/Debian, etc, it's the same commands that you run today, with some updates of course, but most of it looks the same.
I'm so thankful for all of their code that I use everyday for free, especially for those who intended it to be free and open source software from the beginning. To me, they are legends, we will always remember their names, but we should not forget that behind the big names, there are thousands of mostly anonymous FOSS projects contributors who are awesome too!
I believe GNU/Linux systems will continue to improve (almost) forever.
And now that licensed OS vendors like Microsoft, Apple and Google are trying to milk more and more cash from their users using software as a service licences and/or data collection, FOSS OSes might become even more popular even to mainstream users. Windows was so easy to install back in the XP days, now I have to unplug the router so I can get the option to create a local account and not an online account, and find opt-out options of each GPS data collection and Cortana stuff that I don't need or want. Then I have to uninstall trial versions of software I never asked for, which were only previously found on OEM installs... I have many PCs, Windows, Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, but I only keep Windows because I can't run certain games on GNU/Linux...
I really missed knoppix, which revolutionized the installation process by making it possible to run the entire thing from cd or dvd.
5:44 “redhat adopted a business model where they maintain an open source operating system”
This sentence aged well.
I switched to Ubuntu 20.04 from Windows 10 just a few months back. Honestly, that was the best decision of my life. The experience is really amazing. And it is damn easy to do any kind of programming in Linux. A million thanks to Linus Torvalds and the entire open source community.
And thanks for making this video. It was fun to watch.
I heard Linux mint is better
@@fargeeks who cares
@@bhavyakukkar I do
@@fargeeks if someone is happy with what they are using why rub your head in like "I heard Linux mint is better ☝️🤓"
Excellent. that the kind of perspective which cast a lot of light on the subject and brings lots of order on a somewhat many piece jigsaw.
I would love to see a series on history of other distributions.
Great content 👍☺️
best basic intro to linux fireship keepit up men.
@6:26 Storage is cheap and those extra features have a negligible impact on performance, unless you run a potato. Bloat is basically the price of convenience. It makes the system more complex, not the life. 😊
3:35 This has now changed as Slackware has released 15.0 on February 2, 2022.
I've loved Arch ever since I move to linux
Same
I've only tried once to install it in VirtualBox... I've been stuck as to which key selects the needed packages (later found out it's the spacebar, I think).
And as a newbie Linux user how the hell would I know what I need?! Most of those packages meant nothing to me back then...
Haven't tried it ever since... but I'm looking for a good rolling release, so I might give a spin to one of the Arch-based distros, like Garuda.
Arch is NOT for newbies.
@@sanjay_swain yeah? the comment didn't say that it is
@@MetalTrabant Honestly, if you're a newbie, you better stick to one of the popular distros like Linux Mint or Ubuntu, unless you're a masochist, that is.
Started watching it on Manjaro, then used KDE connect to send open this vid on my Android phone and continue watching... Huge respect
Seriously! This is how history should be taught in schools! ✌️
Loved it!
Wow.. I learned A TON of stuff I had no clue about.. So happy I clicked this... being a geek has it's wonderful moments! Thank you!!
So much left unsaid about linux's unique history. Loved your take on linux in less than 10 minutes though.
2:20 the Linux kernel is under GPL 2 and has a clear user space exception.
i switched from win10 to Manjaro for my workstation half a year ago and yes there is a learning curve. however i don't think i would be able to switch back because most things on linux just make sense compared to win10
This was a really informative video. I thought I knew a bit about Linux history but I learned a few new things here. Great job.
I love Linux so much. Thank you to all the people who have made it possible to flourish to where it is now, we owe you an unpayable debt.
One of the greatest TH-cam videos of all time .. where can one get the mindmaps of distro trees?
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg
And then the legend made git so he's literally god.
He and Carmack :-)
Keep on posting Linux videos and i ll be heree all day long
"You never used Linux? Oh you missed a good part of your life", once someone told me
Thank god I know this OS since 14, and Im 15 heh, I helped someone who was 11 years wanted to install arch on his computer so helped him. i wish all people even the "non-techy" ones try it out
You don't miss anything if you're just a casual user
@@hariranormal5584 have been using since when I was 13, now I'm 17 and it was totally worth learning, fixing problems, reading articles, being a part of this community and so on. Trust me, even if you don't work in IT, all of these experiences and ideas (such as foss, collaboration, etc) are gonna influence in how you use and spread your knowledge to make great things
Carlos Eduardo Alvarez
I am generally interested in Hardware, Computer engineering and so on (mostly hardware, not much software) and a bit of networking
It's still useful to have Sys'admin'ing skills tho, I manage a few servers on the cloud owned by friends and stuff. Pretty fun thing to do! 😛
We were running centos, but because its updates are now limited and is gonna go EOL in a few months, we migrated to ubuntu (well I don't like ubuntu, friends forced me for getting ubuntu so i just did it)
@@hariranormal5584 personally, i like both areas, but I have little to none experience with hardware, do you have channel suggestions about it?
4:29 idk if when you wrote this, steamos was debian based but at least as of now, its based on arch (by the way)
Everyday I admire the GNU project more and more
Bro I love your videos. You got one more subscriber. Pls don't stop uploading.
Note: Linux is under GPLv2, not GPLv3 (logo in video)
March 22, 2021 Fireship Released a video "Why so many distros? The Weird History of Linux". Feb 19, 2022, me watching the same video in my Linux. This video was encouraging
Just want to sprinkle a bit of information: in addition to independent distros, there is Void Linux, which functions like Arch, but has its own package manager (xbps), and does not use systemd, bur rather runit.
These videos are sick man, digging the subscription
Libre software is literally the opposite of free market relations considering it rejects private and intellectual property rights. It would be much more accurate to call it communistic since it's free association among free producers (which is why it makes sense that e.g. RMS is a socialist)
@Kian Moore "stop bringing politics into politics"
5:23 Allow me to interject for a moment
It's actually called Pop Underscore Os Exclamation Mark
4:32 steamOs is no longer debian based
It's one thing to write software that changes the world. It's another thing to do it twice!! Absolutely Legendary
Without Richard Stallman's GNU project GNU/Linux would not exist as we know it. Stallman did two things. He created Copyleft and was instrumental in getting built all of the rest of the things you need to make a kernel actually useful. Without either of those you don't have Linux.
I would disagree with the "without either of those" - there was another competing set of programs that could've (and have at various times) been used instead of GNU - and that is BSD. Not to dismiss GNU (which imho is just as impressive an accomplishment) - but the tools are not unique.
Great video!
I did see something that may cause confusion, but probably not: At 2:14 the GPL3 logo was used, but Linux is GPL2.