alt Hacker News> What everybody except Steve Jobs got wrong was not taking user interface seriously enough.
But Linux took over the world and it had a crappy UI. I was there, back when Xorg didn't even exist, running X and messing with modelines on Linux. All the window manager sucked big times.
Sun, just like SGI, got attacked by cheap beige PCs running either Windows or Linux.
I don't think their UI had much to do with their downfall and, arguably, SGI's UIs were better than the competition and they still disappeared too.
Also weren't most machines sold by Sun servers anyway? Their famous "We the dot in .com" tagline.
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> But Linux took over the world and it had a crappy UI. I was there, back when Xorg didn't even exist, running X and messing with modelines on Linux. All the window manager sucked big times.
My first exposure to Solaris was in 2003 when Linux had Gnome 2.6 and Solaris had CDE. The UI on my Debian box seemed decades ahead of the Solaris machines I managed, which looked like Windows 3.1 and performed about as well.
Combined with Linux package managers being infinitely better, the GNU core utilities having so many more conveniences and options than the Solaris equivalents, I felt like Sun was this dinosaur that couldn’t die fast enough. I’ll still never understand why so many people praise Sun for its engineering culture when free software seemed so superior to me at the time.
My favorite anecdote exemplifying my opinion about Solaris at the time: you log into the console of your Sun workstation, running SunOS, with your Sun keyboard plugged in, and press backspace. It echoes ^H back to you. They couldn’t even figure out how to configure their own keyboards correctly out of the box.
Maybe in the 90s the standards were different. Maybe their tech was better. But by the time I ever used their software is was the butt of jokes.
At the end of the day, the UI on a Unix server was always shell based. That was just the best way to configure a server. (And, in some way Infrastructure as Code is an evolution of the shell scripts a unix admin would use.)
Linux won on the server side because they got just as right as Unix. The crappy UI (windows) was the one that didn't work with shell scripting, didn't work with ssh, etc.
Linux was free, and people will put up with a lot of shit for that.
> and it had a crappy UI.
That wasn't even true back then.
> But Linux took over the world and it had a crappy UI.
Linux took over in all the places where a good GUI didn't matter. In ran most of the Unix server software on hardware orders of magnitude cheaper than what was needed to run a commercial Unix. Windows ran on that same cheap hardware but was much more expensive for the same capability.
Despite Sun's marketing push Linux was really the dot in most of the dotcom darlings.
I remember a web page put up by an SGI employee, saying that x86 wasn't going to destroy the Unix workstation business. The title was "Pecked To Death By Ducks".
Then Intel came out with dual-core processors, which was the new hotness. So he wrote a followup page, literally titled "Pecked To Death By Ducks With Two Bills".
At the time, I thought they were funny, and made reasonable arguments. But in retrospect, they were just trying to distract the customers from the fact that Intel was overtaking them.
The vast majority of Linux installations don’t have a UI, they’re headless, and it was the same with Sun. I.E. the UI is irrelevant to the success or failure of Linux and Sun.
Linux took over the world because any licensing model that requires a per CPU license simply can’t work in a massively scalable situation like server farms and cloud.