VA Linux: The biggest dotcom IPO

(dfarq.homeip.net)

48 points | by giuliomagnifico 5 days ago

3 comments

  • wmf 1 hour ago
    A fun tangent to this is ESR's "Surprised By Wealth" where he accidentally became paper rich off VA Linux stock but never made any real money due to the crash. https://lwn.net/1999/1216/a/esr-rich.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37708492
    • cheema33 47 minutes ago
      I am not going to shed a tear for ESR. He turned out to be a massive turd.
      • wmf 33 minutes ago
        ESR was always somewhat controversial. People trolled him at the time for what they saw as faux humility and virtue signaling.
  • mikestorrent 2 hours ago
    Ahh, I'd totally forgotten they evolved into Sourceforge. A pity that they didn't pivot to Git hosting more quickly or they would have had a pretty good path to serious ROI for the enterprise.
    • zeruch 50 minutes ago
      They didn't evolve into SF; SF was a project inside of VA that eventually became the flagship of what remained after the hardware and related services were excised. When they started (1998/99), Git wasn't a viable option (the first version of it wasn't released until 2005, by which point SF had ballooned to an enormous scale at the time, with it's own product inertia, and it would be a few more years before Git would become a major VCS itself, which is when Github started, and by then VA/SF was in decline and had changed hands several times.

      (disclosure: I was on the "Ignition team" for SF)

  • 0xbadcafebee 2 hours ago
    > Today, it’s a little unusual for something you buy not to work with Linux

    Err... no, it's definitely not unusual. I specifically spent a month looking for a laptop with Linux support just so I didn't have to go through the hell of unsupported hardware, and it's still not fully supported.

    • gkhartman 2 hours ago
      If you don't mind me asking, what did you end up buying, and what was lacking support? I'd expect full support from one of the "Linux first" suppliers like System76.
      • pcdoyle 1 hour ago
        I just got a ThinkPad E14 Gen 6 and the only thing I had to fix/install manually was the driver for the fingerprint reader (fprintd). Everything else just worked, including my docking station and ultra wide monitor.
    • whatever1 2 hours ago
      Not even high resolution screens work properly yet.

      Wayland has done some progress, but still half of my applications look like sh when I use fractional scaling.

      Linux is great if all you need is a terminal. Once you need a peripheral, then good luck, literally.

      • ghqqwwee 1 hour ago
        There’s no OS that doesn’t have problems with wireless headsets in Teams. Bluetooth and sound stacks is a badly/barely working combination everywhere. Hibernation is usually the test that fails the sound stacks everywhere.
      • ThePowerOfFuet 49 minutes ago
        >Wayland has done some progress, but still half of my applications look like sh when I use fractional scaling.

        Do they look like shell, or like shit? You can use grownup words here.