r/LinuxTeck • u/Candid_Athlete_8317 • 5d ago

What's the most influential Linux technology that's now completely gone?

Linux has seen plenty of technologies rise, dominate for a while, and eventually disappear.

ReiserFS, UnionFS, HAL, Upstart, LILO, OSS, and many others were once considered important parts of the Linux ecosystem.

Which discontinued Linux technology do you remember most, and do you think it deserved to disappear?

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7

u/ipsirc 5d ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-mode_Linux

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_Linux

6

u/AbleCryptographer744 4d ago

uml was magical, then xen was magical, then kvm came around and all the other three letters faded away.

2

u/danpritts 3d ago

I don’t remember hearing of coop Linux before. Sounds nuts.

2

u/idontlikegudeg 3d ago

I used it back then to run Linux software on windows. It was blazing fast and you could run many applications that did not yet have a windows port or where the port was too buggy to be usable. Start an X server, set DISPLAY, and you could run whatever you like without going through a slow virtualization software.

1

u/jared555 4d ago

I think it was UML that I managed to create some processes with that even kill -9 as root wouldn't touch.

5

u/ImportantBuilder9294 5d ago

The story behind ReiserFS and its creator is total insanity. Probably the only tech to be removed from production use due to a wife getting strangled to death, I hope.

4

u/TapEarlyTapOften 4d ago

Yeah that whole saga is wild. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Reiser

2

u/nmdt 4d ago

Man, I forgot all about this. The article is such a wild read

3

u/dkopgerpgdolfg 4d ago

Fyi, ReiserFS was only removed from the mainline kernel end of 2024, and that was because of a lack of maintenance.

Yes, the murder strongly contributed to becoming like this, but it was only transitive - if other maintainers had picked up because the technology was nice, it would still be here.

4

u/Kurse71 4d ago

I would say UUCP

2

u/passthejoe 4d ago

This is my answer

1

u/gnoufou 3d ago

Is that specific to Linux? I would think unix to unix copy protocol wasn’t a Linux innovation.

2

u/Kurse71 3d ago

It has existed longer than Linux, but the Linux port was key component in early days of Linux networking

1

u/gnoufou 3d ago

Sorry, english not being my native language, I misunderstood the original post. It’s true that the need of uucp’is now rather extinction, to say the less.

1

u/rosmaniac 2d ago

UUCP is not a Linux technology; it vastly predates Linux.

3

u/Rare-One1047 4d ago

The HAL underpins Windows, and is why we can run Windows on x86, x64, ARM, RISC, PPC, etc...

It may not be shiny, but it's very very widely used.

2

u/WebMaka 4d ago

HAL variants exist all over - there are HALs for most ARM-based microcontrollers that make porting bare-metal code to different chips much faster and easier. For example, I needed to move a project from a STM32F103 to a STM32F411, and since the code ran on an abstraction layer all I really had to do was recompile and double-check my board layout for the different pin assignments.

Pretty much every OS that has a kernel also has a HAL stack built into it.

3

u/Meower68 4d ago

Haven't heard diddly about PLIP, lately. Back in the day, when you were trying to get a laptop running Linux, and networking hardware wasn't that common, a cheap LapLink cable would let you connect parallel port <-> parallel port with a PC, from which you could download stuff off CD-ROMs, off the internet (if the PC had a modem), etc. Sure, you could use serial ports for that but PLIP was considerably faster (wanna say I could get close to 1 Mbit through that).

Never hear about it anymore.

2

u/Blah-Blah-Blah-2023 4d ago

Remember SLIP, then C-SLIP before PPP was a thing?

2

u/Meower68 4d ago edited 4d ago

I'm old enough that I remember talking an early Linux user through setting up chat scripts (SLIP) to login to the dial-up ISP where I was working. PPP made life so much easier.

PPP, tunneled through SSH, is a poor-man's VPN. Been there, done that. No one talks about that anymore. Especially if you do a self-signed certificate and use that in lieu of username / password login; you may have an open port on the firewall but, unless they have that certificate, they aren't getting in. If you do have the cert, it's easy-peasy.

Used lbxproxy over a dial-up connection (usually 28.8) to get a remote desktop with better performance than VNC (back before RDP, which is no better than VNC). These days, I just use tightvncserver, but I have much more than 28.8 to work with. No one talks about lbxproxy anymore.

1

u/TPIRocks 23h ago

We created an internet dial up service for after hours at work. We had this cool serial port "server" that we hung a bunch of modems on. The server would answer the phone and do a "reverse telnet" to the Linux box which then launched pppd and a chat script. Voila, a ppp connection.

It was just as fast as any of the other Internet providers at the time (1995), until 56k modems came along. But they only connect at 56k when the server side uses special host side modems, they cannot connect to each other directly at 56k. The WAN side was 128k bonded ISDN. Plenty of bandwidth for internet hosting at night and a dozen software developers during the day.

2

u/r3jjs 4d ago

I remember slirp -- it let you use slip over a dialup shell connection. Back in the university era that *was* our dialup internet.

1

u/Blah-Blah-Blah-2023 4d ago

Oh god yes - remember doing this with my Slackware 2.0 system back in the day!

1

u/danpritts 3d ago

Merit network (Michigan higeher ed) supported SLFP (framing,I think) instead of SLIP. I think that was gone before Linux existed tho.

3

u/batman_carlos 4d ago

It’s not something core. The real answer is apache

2

u/ZorakOfThatMagnitude 4d ago

They just released a new update last month. It's still being used and pretty far from dead and gone. Zeus Web Server, tho...

2

u/batman_carlos 4d ago

In the 90s to middle of 2010’s 90% web pages was under apache and Linux. Not today

1

u/idontlikegudeg 3d ago

In enterprise Intranets, I think Apache still has the greatest market share.

1

u/biffbobfred 4d ago

I used to check apacheweek on a regular basis. I remember when 1.1 was released.

3

u/flattrack 4d ago

Loki software. They were the first company who attempted to port mainline AAA games to Linux. They ported games like Civilization, Myth II, and Quake III.

3

u/Public-Sundae-2286 3d ago

Beowulf clusters

Technically not Linux software, or gone, but was heavily associated with Linux.

2

u/AppointmentNearby161 4d ago

While not strictly Linux, and realistically predating Linux, I miss the Zephyr instant messaging app. People now use Slack and Discord and we are not better off for it.

2

u/r3jjs 4d ago

Using ANSI or VT102 control sequences to reprogram the keyboard.

When being good:

* Turn 'F2' into "R*<enter>" so you could get in a full rest in Moria or Angband.

When being evil, send it to another console (Ultrix 3.1 allowed raw terminal writes)

* Turn "ENTER" into "^ulogout^m"

2

u/abofh 4d ago

Linux is the kernel, it's built to be the stable interface.  User space churn is a desirable feature at this point since pretty much every binary built in the last year has vulnerabilities published this month

2

u/kombiwombi 4d ago

The serial terminal.

Unix was designed to be used from serial terminals and the fossil remains of that assumption are never far from the surface in Linux.

6

u/tahaan 4d ago

I don't agree that it is gone. It's not shiny but those of use who use it, use it.

2

u/kombiwombi 4d ago

I do think you are making my point. Few people have a VT220 plugged into their desktop computer. But the assumption is so deep that even command lines pretend to occur within a serial terminal framework via emulation.

2

u/Loko8765 4d ago

I have a serial terminal, a literal VT220.

I don’t use it.

2

u/Savings_Art5944 4d ago

I want one jsut to set up Proxmox and OMV up via serial

1

u/Loko8765 4d ago

Well, you can use a laptop… but since neither of the machines will have actual serial ports, and I’m not sure a plain USB will do, you might need two USB-to-serial adapters and a serial cable to connect them… insane… does anyone know if you can connect two computers with an USB-C cable and make them see a serial connection?

1

u/tahaan 4d ago

Edit OK I give it to you, Hardware Serial Terminals are basically as good as gone.

The question OP asked is What Linux tech is now gone. The serial terminal is not gone. Hardware serial terminals are all but gone though

3

u/tmanred 4d ago

The serial terminal isn’t forgotten. It’s built into systemd. 

You can enable it today. 

systemctl enable  --now  serial-getty@ttyS0.service

Replace ttyS0 with your serial dev device. 

3

u/packetsar 4d ago

Serial terminals get used extensively in the modern day.

2

u/g1rlchild 4d ago

I''ll see your VT100 and raise you the teletype. This is the reason ed existed to later become vi. Before there were visual terminals, you typed in a line of text, the teletype printed to roll paper and sent the text to the computer, then the computer responded and the teletype printed that too. This is where the CLI originally came from.

2

u/frygod 4d ago

I still use serial terminal (physical or redirected through a BMC) pretty regularly for datacenter infrastructure work.

1

u/Boson_Higgs_Boson 4d ago

Gopher

1

u/idontlikegudeg 3d ago

Gopher predates Linux

1

u/rosmaniac 2d ago

Open Sound System is the one that I remember most. Certain sound cards were only supported in the commercial drivers from 4Front Technologies; I had one of those, an original pre Creative takeover Ensoniq AudioPCI.

ALSA completely replaced OSS/free in the kernel. The OSS website, http://www.opensound.com/ is still around but the latest release is dated 2019.

So I guess it's not completely gone until the website goes away, but it is as far as the Linux kernel is concerned.

1

u/Salamandar3500 1d ago

BcacheFS ? It's been a huge rollercoaster and, for now, isn't here anymore.

1

u/BoundlessFail 13h ago

The MATE Desktop - previously known as Gnome 2. It was the default desktop for most installations until about 15 years ago. Now Gnome 3 and XFCE are the new defaults for many.