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Linux was called 'obsolete' in 1992, and now it powers servers around the world
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this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2026
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I mean, from what we learnt on university the "messiness" of a monolithic kernel seems "wrong" and a microkernel arch seems "better design". Once you spend a couple of decades in the workforce and opening your mind... I haven't seen a single "good modular design" that doesn't suck balls, super bloated and with many performance issues just to make it "pretty".
So, while I'm not claiming it doesn't exist... I think is at the very least debatable.
Also, in 1992, when this article came out: you couldn't just walk into Walmart and get a CD with Debian or Slackware on it (still cant but thats another story). If you wanted the latest reliable word processor, email, hardware drivers and access to excel you basically had no choice but to slap down $100 for a Windows or OSx install. Only enthusiasts, academics and scientists had the bandwidth capacity to download and update an entire OS in 1992. CD burners themselves were $10 000 in 1992.
TBF, in 1992 you might have had a hard time getting slackware at all since it was officially released in 1993.
However, when I first used it around 1997, it was just a stack of floppies, no CD needed.
That's painful. I had a proper purchased slackware 3.1 CD in 1997.
I tried a two-diskette non-distro from "so much shareware 2". I think it was minted in 1993 and labelled Linux 0.99b