Today Marks 20 Years Since Starting Phoronix For Linux Hardware Reviews & News
It's been wild going from worrying about 56K modem support, USB input peripherals not working, setting up GPU acceleration being quite a chore and manual X.Org configuration management to where the Linux hardware scene is at these days. Linux now dominates across servers and HPC, the GPU driver experience is a night and day difference, there is increasingly great open-source and upstream GPU driver support from most hardware vendors, and Linux support for new hardware in many cases is almost a given. It's typically no longer if a device will work with Linux but more along the lines of how it will perform or what non-core features/functionality may not yet be supported.
While Linux hardware support has greatly improved over the past 20 years, there still are some cases of not having timely upstream hardware support, the few notable proprietary drivers out there (at least in recent time NVIDIA as the major exception has been increasingly more open with their kernel drivers), and PR/media folks at the major hardware vendors no longer treat me like an alien when bringing up "Linux".
The tide of Linux distributions has also changed vastly from the days of Mandrake Linux, Knoppix, Yellow Dog Linux, Lindows / Linspire, Yoper, and other old timer Linux distributions to the age of Ubuntu, Arch Linux, the much more mature Fedora Linux compared to the early Fedora (Core) days, etc.
The 2005 state of Linspire (formerly Lindows).
It's been interesting and keeping me going has been the constant flow of exciting new hardware to push the limits of compute from CPUs and GPUs to keep me intrigued. The focus on Linux power efficiency has also been a nice trend that has increased significantly over the past 20 years or more particularly over the past 10. It's been absolutely fascinating to see how far the Linux hardware and software has come over this time.
Today also marks 16 years since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 for advancing open-source automated benchmarking. While it continues to be used by many individuals and organizations outside of Phoronix, sadly though not much has advanced there in the more recent years due to its mature framework with these days mostly adding/updating test profiles and then beyond that limited by time/resource constraints.
Thanks to those new and old readers to Phoronix for keeping this going after 20 years. While the Linux hardware/software ecosystem has advanced much in these two decades, sadly, the web advertising industry has only degraded -- severely. Over the years with more rampant use of ad-blockers, companies like Meta dominating the ad space, and the overall decline of the ad industry has made operations only more difficult as time continues. Thus it's left to me grueling day in and day out working on all of the content, hardware testing, and benchmarks. It's been about one decade since the last day there's been no new original content on Phoronix in a 24 hour period.
It's a passion for Linux hardware that continues despite the difficulties. Those that do enjoy my daily original Linux-focused hardware/software content can consider taking part in the Phoronix 20th birthday Premium deal -- it runs all this week -- for enjoying the site ad-free and multi-page articles presented on a single page, native dark mode, and helping to ensure Phoronix can continue. The Phoronix 20th birthday special all week is a lower rate for enjoying the ad-free premium while helping support site operations. Tips via PayPal and Stripe are welcome and appreciated as well if so desired.
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