LINUX is obsolete (1992)

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Long-term predictions, hindsight, and humility

  • Many comments riff on how confident 1990s/2000s predictions (about Linux, iPhone, Flash, mobile web, etc.) look wrong now.
  • People describe cringing at their own old posts but frame that as evidence of growth; stagnation in opinions is seen as the real failure.
  • Several recall dismissing cameras in phones, web apps on phones, or app stores, using these as reminders that actual adoption routinely defies “expert” forecasts.

Archiving and future readers

  • Speculation about someone in 2058 reading today’s HN, perhaps from a parchment or cave archive.
  • Desire to create durable, book-like archives of HN for historians.
  • Side thread on Reddit’s “soft delete”: users’ deletions hurt public archives more than the company, which still retains and can monetize data.

Microkernel vs monolithic: theory vs practice

  • Tanenbaum’s 1992 claim that “microkernels have won” is challenged with historical counterexamples: BSD, SunOS, Windows NT, Mach/NeXTSTEP/macOS, OSF/1, all essentially monolithic or hybrid for performance reasons.
  • Microkernels are noted as common mainly in embedded and special-purpose systems (e.g., Intel ME’s Minix, L4/seL4), not as general-purpose desktop/server bases.
  • Several argue that early microkernel efforts (Mach, NT in strict form) were too slow, driving systems back toward monolithic or hybrid designs, especially for graphics and filesystems.
  • Others counter that shared-memory IPC can match intra-process performance and that the real problem was kernel-mediated IPC in first-generation microkernels.

Why Linux actually “won”

  • Consensus that success was driven more by pragmatics than purity:
    • Free as in beer and early GPL licensing enabling redistribution and collaboration.
    • Minix’s non-free status until 2000 and BSD’s lawsuit troubles left Linux as the obvious free Unix-like for hobbyists and students.
    • Rapid hardware support and willingness to work around cheap PC quirks made Linux attractive vs. more rigid BSDs and commercial Unixes.
    • Timing: Linux matured just as Intel PCs exploded in popularity.
  • Some stress the GPL’s “you must share improvements” as a unifying force, avoiding the fragmentation that plagued BSD-style licensed Unixes.

Is Linux “obsolete” today?

  • One camp: academically obsolete but commercially central; like a toaster, it’s not research-fresh but still indispensable.
  • Another: Linux/Unix are fundamentally outdated; microkernels, safer languages, and new designs (e.g., NixOS-like ideas, Rust microkernels) are where OS research “ought” to go.
  • Counterpoint: in practice, containers, microservices, JSON RPC, and serverless already waste any kernel-level performance advantage; for many workloads, “which kernel” barely matters.
  • “Worse is Better” is invoked: simpler, familiar, and incrementally improved monolithic Unix outcompeted more elegant designs.

Judging the original Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate

  • Some see Tanenbaum’s “you’d fail my course” and “debate is over” lines as argument-from-authority that aged poorly and colored perceptions of him.
  • Others maintain his theoretical points still hold: long-lived systems need clean design; Linux survives only because thousands are paid to maintain an increasingly unwieldy codebase.
  • Linus’s responses are remembered as surprisingly civil, especially for an unknown student addressing a famous professor; some suggest this restraint was strategically necessary.

Minix, secure OS research, and funding

  • Discussion of an EU-funded “secure Minix3” effort; blog activity appears to end around 2016, leading some to conclude the project is effectively dead.
  • Frustration that Intel benefited massively from using Minix in its management engine yet seemingly invested nothing back into Minix as a community OS.

Licensing, FOSS culture, and network effects

  • Multiple commenters argue Linux’s GPL license and open development model were decisive: it let companies and individuals collaborate in one codebase rather than quietly forking.
  • Stories of early Linux installs (from magazine CDs or floppies) emphasize the impact of “a full Unix-like OS, with compiler and server stack, for free” compared to proprietary, shareware-filled Windows ecosystems.
  • GNU Hurd is cited as an example of a theoretically appealing microkernel that stalled due to complexity and project management, reinforcing the “working code wins” narrative.

Industry–academia gap

  • The thread repeatedly returns to how academic certainty about “where OSes are going” diverged from reality.
  • Suggested reasons: researchers chase novelty and publishable originality; industry optimizes for profit, risk reduction, and incremental improvement.
  • Some liken decisions in OS and language adoption more to politics and organizational incentives than to pure technical merit.