[lelanthran]

There was a critical time in the industry, if your tech didn't run on Linux it was dead in the water.

Delphi and C++ builder should have been ported to Linux and the BSDs by 2001.

They hitched their wagon to Windows and are now almost a footnote in history.

Come to think of it, almost all Windows only applications faced the same fate.

[slowmovintarget]

No. It wasn't Linux, it was web applications that did Delphi in commercially. GUI desktop software was suddenly unpopular and web applications were all the rage because OMG! just go live! No upgrade and multi-platform InstallShield build to deal with.

My first serious language was Turbo Pascal 3.0. When Delphi came out, I jumped on board. My first programming job was as a Delphi programmer, starting with Delphi 1, switching to Java after Delphi 5 Enterprise. Delphi, and even C++ Builder were IDEs geared toward producing desktop client-server applications. If you were building web apps Java was the place to be.

Kylix never mattered, because Linux desktop applications didn't matter, generally speaking, so it never became profitable. Linux as an alternative to Solaris on servers was a huge deal though, and is now nearly ubiquitous. But again, Delphi came very late to the web application game.

[coverband]

That was exactly it… Plus their clumsy rebranding over and over, changing licensing terms that stopped non-enterprise users from adopting, and the CS educators adopting Java and dropping Pascal… They tried to use Delphi as a cash cow when they needed innovation…

[heelix]

One of my early professional 'whoops' was with Delphi. We delivered a client (server) application that was sent out on like 20 floppy disks. I misspelled Pharmaceutical, which was part of the company name, on the splash screen. We had a lot of 'junk' floppies floating around the office after that.

The way the web changed customer facing software was amazing at the time.

[mellosouls]

There was a critical time in the industry, if your tech didn't run on Linux it was dead in the water.

No. I can't remember that ever being a thing, I've no idea where you got that idea from.

[eitland]

I guess it was more Mac than Linux, and it happened around peak Rails.

[pjmlp]

Except outside wealthy countries, macOS doesn't really matter and has about 20% market share across the globe.

[eitland]

True, and on a global scale 20% is even a much larger percentage than I would have expected.

My point however is that when I started working in IT I was the only one at the places where I worked who used something other than Windows whenever possible and also advocated for it.

Then there was a change. And as far as I can see that change started with screencasting and as far as I saw, the first widely popular screencasts that existed was Rails, created mostly by 37 Signals (now Basecamp I guess) and other Rails devs/enthusiasts.

I might be wrong about this but I feel fairly certain these guys drove a lot of the change in peoples and organisations attitude to alternative OSes.

Also: for a long time it seemed Linux adoption was also lower in less wealthy countries as using unlicensed versions of Windows are much more accepted there.

[pjmlp]

I would say that its adoption was mainly driven by iOS development, the meme of Year of Desktop Linux hardly coming true as the desktop story keeps being rebooted every couple of years, and the fact that many folks don't really care about GNU/Linux per se, any POSIX environment will do just fine.

As it turns out, the remaining 78% users (taking out the usual 2% from Steam surveys) that cared about POSIX tooling, were happy to use SUA, cygwin, mingw, Virtual Box, VMWare for their needs, and now have WSL in the box anyway.

[eitland]

> I would say that its adoption was mainly driven by iOS development, [...]

That is an extremely good point that somehow escaped me.

[Zuider]

Borland released a Delphi compiler for Linux in the late 90s named Kylix, discontinued in 2011. However, it was not successful for a number of reasons, notably that there were better, free IDEs available, there were many compiler errors, and poor integration with GDB. For this reason, developers found it frustrating to use, and it had poor uptake. Even so, Borland had spent so much trying to make Kylix work that it contributed significantly to the company's ultimate collapse.

[IgorPartola]

I cut my teeth on Delphi and I don’t remember Linux ever coming up despite me using it quite a bit. Delphi’s bug strength was the really polished UI builder. The language itself was almost secondary to that. But the UI builder was married to Windows UI and I don’t honestly know how well it might have been translated to something like GTK or QT. Also in the early 2000s both GTK and QT were going through some major changes and so were moving targets.

Besides, the early 2000s were the era of the “this is the year of Desktop Linux” tech articles. Of course that never materialized and Linux desktop is still pretty niche. So I don’t really see how lack of Linux support had anything to do with it.

[elzbardico]

More than this: Borland underestimated the role of web apps, and bet that enterprise users would never move from native client server apps to web apps.

[marcus_holmes]

They weren't the only ones making this mistake at the time.

I remember having a "ruh-oh!" moment when a junior dev showed me his latest DHTML web page that did something we'd previously been doing in VB. The sudden realisation that this was significant and I'd better get on with learning it or be left behind was painful. The urge to continue dismissing the web as a good information source but not somewhere you did things was strong.

[comrad]

Well, they did in 2003. Kylix was the attempt to offer Delphi 6 RAD for Linux.

https://wiki.freepascal.org/Kylix

[lelanthran]

I don't remember why, but kylix didn't work for me.

And C++ builder was never ported.