I would imagine a lot of critics went up to him and proudly proclaimed that “Linux will never reach 1% marketshare!”

  • neidu3@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    Well, it was a hobby project, so there weren’t really any naysayers. Apart from Linus himself.

    To quote an adorable snipped from the original release announcement: “just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu” as well as “It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(”

    • UpperBroccoli
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      1 day ago

      Well, there was Andrew Tanenbaum, who AFAIR claimed that Linux was not a proper operating system, because it does not sport a microkernel or some such.

      • neidu3@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        True-ish. He claimed that it was obsolete upon release because microkernels were the future. However, that turned out yo age like milk. It is, however, important to note that Torvalds and him remained on good terms despite this initial disagreement - It wasn’t really that big of a feud to begin with. It was somewhat heated in the moment, but they’ve remained mutually respecting friends

        While there are several advantages to micro kernels, it doesn’t mean anything else is inferior.

        There were also some other complaints from the same guy regarding specifically building for the I386 architecture, but considering how utterly dominant I386 would turn out to be, I th8nk this aspect of the criticism can be dismissed on its entirety.