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How do you define "popularity"? UNIX is found in many devices end users don't think of as being "computers" at all. The best software is the software users do

How do you define "popularity"? UNIX is found in many devices end users don't think of as being "computers" at all. The best software is the software users don't even realize is there, because it just works.

coldtea 10y ago
Well, the meaningful way for UNIX (and Linux) to succeed as a popular product, according to the aspirations of its proponents, was on the desktop. It wasn't just about the server side back then (late 90s, early 00s) it was all about taking over Windows. If somebody uses some hardware product (e.g. set top box) and doesn't know its Linux, then it's no big win for the Linux community. And it's not just necessarily that users don't realize it's there because "it just works", either. The set top box, for example, can be buggy or crappy but just not provide neither a way to dive in and fix it, nor branding related to Linux.
- cperciva 10y ago
  If somebody uses some hardware product (e.g. set top box) and doesn't know its Linux, then it's no big win for the Linux community. I have to disagree there. It may not be a marketing win, but that doesn't mean that there are no other benefits. The fact that the PlayStation 4 runs FreeBSD has resulted in a large number of improvements becoming available to us; whether Johnny knows that his games are running on a daemonic operating system is of very little relevance.
  - bluejekyll 10y ago
    > daemonic operating system I've never seen someone refer to it like that before. Awesome.
  - dTal 10y ago
    >the PlayStation 4 runs FreeBSD wait, what? Awesome.
  - JonnieCache 10y ago
    >The fact that the PlayStation 4 runs FreeBSD has resulted in a large number of improvements becoming available to us Is there a writeup of this anywhere? If stuff has been backported/upstreamed/whatever from the PS4 to the freeBSD kernel that would truly be living the dream!
    - cperciva 10y ago
      The fact that the PS4 runs FreeBSD has been written about extensively. The contributions they've made, less so... mainly because most of the work they did was before they announced that they were using FreeBSD, and they went to significant lengths to avoid that information leaking out (e.g., shell companies were set up so that code could be contributed without revealing the ultimate source). Probably the most easily identifiable contributions are in LLVM; Sony is one of the largest contributors to that project, and it's entirely due to the PS4.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      They talked a bit about it on their LLVM talks. http://llvm.org/devmtg/2013-11/#talk8 http://llvm.org/devmtg/2013-11/#talk8
- pmontra 10y ago
  The only successful desktop UNIX derivative is MacOS. That ship has sailed. However the most relevant computing devices for consumers are phones and tablets nowadays, not desktops. UNIX derivatives run almost all of them. Big success, I'd say. UNIX derivatives are running most servers too and are making inroads into the Windows desktop. The outlook is good unless a new popular market suddenly open with no meaningful *nix presence in it.
  - xorcist 10y ago
    Chromebooks are very successful, outselling MacOS desktops in 2016. They run a pretty standard Linux environment. I don't think anyone thought Linux to take over the office desktop by mass porting office applications but by moving them to the web. That shift is still happening.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      Chromebooks provide access to the underlying Linux distribution, after doing a magic incantation that the common user doesn't have any idea about. For the non geek audience, it is a browser based OS. Google could base it in something else, and none of them would notice it.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      >Chromebooks are very successful, outselling MacOS desktops in 2016. That's still products from multiple vendors (Dell, HP, and Lenovo, Asus?, etc) narrowingly beating sales from a single vendor. And that (a) in a year when the single vendor had stalled updating their product line, and (b) with the Chromebooks being much cheaper, and more mass market, offerings. So this speaks more to the slow sales of Chromebooks during the previous years than some major breakthrough.
    - pmontra 10y ago
      You're right, according to the the US stats I saw. I probably forgot about them because I never saw one (Italy here) or if I saw them I mistaken them for a Windows laptop. However I think I never heard the word Chromebook in a conversation, either work or friends. We could use a Chromebook everywhere we're connecting to the Internet with our laptops but apparently we're not.
deaddodo 10y ago
> UNIX is found in many devices end users don't think of as being "computers" at all. No, Linux is. http://kernelbook.sourceforge.net/pdf/ch-intro.pdf http://kernelbook.sourceforge.net/pdf/ch-intro.pdf Some devices run BSD derivatives, but I'd still hesitate to call those Unix vs derived from Unix.
- aap_ 10y ago
  The name UNIX is just not well defined. Saying Linux is a UNIX is perfectly valid imo, but everyone has a different idea of what UNIX means. That pdf btw has quite a few misconceptions about the history of UNIX.
  - jamiesonbecker 10y ago
    > The name UNIX is just not well defined. Saying Linux is a UNIX is perfectly valid imo, but everyone has a different idea of what UNIX means. The trademark UNIX® and its specification is (still) tightly controlled[1] and licensing and compliance was far too expensive for Linus to think about it for his tiny Linux-like OS. (A Linux distribution did recently get certified as UNIX® but that's a recent exception.) There have been multiple lawsuits between different companies about what could be considered UNIX. The original Linux distribution was basically GNU (GNU is NOT UNIX) utilities wrapped around a deliberately non-UNIX kernel called Linux. Back when people were trying to explain Linux to UNIX users, it was called "UNIX-like" or a UNIX® clone. Now that Linux has clearly eclipsed UNIX, even now no one really calls Linux, "UNIX" or vice-versa. They are very similar but they are different. There is also another specification called POSIX. Even Windows NT had a POSIX-compliant layer for a while, and Services for UNIX had some licensed IP, but no one would claim that Windows NT was UNIX. See also Lisivka's comments [2] further down: Linux is not UNIX. See also the Single UNIX Specification[3]. 1. http://www.opengroup.org/subjectareas/platform/unix http://www.opengroup.org/subjectareas/platform/unix 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13204551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13204551 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification
    - 10y ago

coldtea 10y ago

Well, the meaningful way for UNIX (and Linux) to succeed as a popular product, according to the aspirations of its proponents, was on the desktop. It wasn't just about the server side back then (late 90s, early 00s) it was all about taking over Windows. If somebody uses some hardware product (e.g. set top box) and doesn't know its Linux, then it's no big win for the Linux community. And it's not just necessarily that users don't realize it's there because "it just works", either. The set top box, for example, can be buggy or crappy but just not provide neither a way to dive in and fix it, nor branding related to Linux.

cperciva 10y ago
If somebody uses some hardware product (e.g. set top box) and doesn't know its Linux, then it's no big win for the Linux community. I have to disagree there. It may not be a marketing win, but that doesn't mean that there are no other benefits. The fact that the PlayStation 4 runs FreeBSD has resulted in a large number of improvements becoming available to us; whether Johnny knows that his games are running on a daemonic operating system is of very little relevance.
- bluejekyll 10y ago
  > daemonic operating system I've never seen someone refer to it like that before. Awesome.
- dTal 10y ago
  >the PlayStation 4 runs FreeBSD wait, what? Awesome.
- JonnieCache 10y ago
  >The fact that the PlayStation 4 runs FreeBSD has resulted in a large number of improvements becoming available to us Is there a writeup of this anywhere? If stuff has been backported/upstreamed/whatever from the PS4 to the freeBSD kernel that would truly be living the dream!
  - cperciva 10y ago
    The fact that the PS4 runs FreeBSD has been written about extensively. The contributions they've made, less so... mainly because most of the work they did was before they announced that they were using FreeBSD, and they went to significant lengths to avoid that information leaking out (e.g., shell companies were set up so that code could be contributed without revealing the ultimate source). Probably the most easily identifiable contributions are in LLVM; Sony is one of the largest contributors to that project, and it's entirely due to the PS4.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    They talked a bit about it on their LLVM talks. http://llvm.org/devmtg/2013-11/#talk8 http://llvm.org/devmtg/2013-11/#talk8
pmontra 10y ago
The only successful desktop UNIX derivative is MacOS. That ship has sailed. However the most relevant computing devices for consumers are phones and tablets nowadays, not desktops. UNIX derivatives run almost all of them. Big success, I'd say. UNIX derivatives are running most servers too and are making inroads into the Windows desktop. The outlook is good unless a new popular market suddenly open with no meaningful *nix presence in it.
- xorcist 10y ago
  Chromebooks are very successful, outselling MacOS desktops in 2016. They run a pretty standard Linux environment. I don't think anyone thought Linux to take over the office desktop by mass porting office applications but by moving them to the web. That shift is still happening.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Chromebooks provide access to the underlying Linux distribution, after doing a magic incantation that the common user doesn't have any idea about. For the non geek audience, it is a browser based OS. Google could base it in something else, and none of them would notice it.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >Chromebooks are very successful, outselling MacOS desktops in 2016. That's still products from multiple vendors (Dell, HP, and Lenovo, Asus?, etc) narrowingly beating sales from a single vendor. And that (a) in a year when the single vendor had stalled updating their product line, and (b) with the Chromebooks being much cheaper, and more mass market, offerings. So this speaks more to the slow sales of Chromebooks during the previous years than some major breakthrough.
  - pmontra 10y ago
    You're right, according to the the US stats I saw. I probably forgot about them because I never saw one (Italy here) or if I saw them I mistaken them for a Windows laptop. However I think I never heard the word Chromebook in a conversation, either work or friends. We could use a Chromebook everywhere we're connecting to the Internet with our laptops but apparently we're not.

deaddodo 10y ago

> UNIX is found in many devices end users don't think of as being "computers" at all. No, Linux is. http://kernelbook.sourceforge.net/pdf/ch-intro.pdf http://kernelbook.sourceforge.net/pdf/ch-intro.pdf Some devices run BSD derivatives, but I'd still hesitate to call those Unix vs derived from Unix.

aap_ 10y ago
The name UNIX is just not well defined. Saying Linux is a UNIX is perfectly valid imo, but everyone has a different idea of what UNIX means. That pdf btw has quite a few misconceptions about the history of UNIX.
- jamiesonbecker 10y ago
  > The name UNIX is just not well defined. Saying Linux is a UNIX is perfectly valid imo, but everyone has a different idea of what UNIX means. The trademark UNIX® and its specification is (still) tightly controlled[1] and licensing and compliance was far too expensive for Linus to think about it for his tiny Linux-like OS. (A Linux distribution did recently get certified as UNIX® but that's a recent exception.) There have been multiple lawsuits between different companies about what could be considered UNIX. The original Linux distribution was basically GNU (GNU is NOT UNIX) utilities wrapped around a deliberately non-UNIX kernel called Linux. Back when people were trying to explain Linux to UNIX users, it was called "UNIX-like" or a UNIX® clone. Now that Linux has clearly eclipsed UNIX, even now no one really calls Linux, "UNIX" or vice-versa. They are very similar but they are different. There is also another specification called POSIX. Even Windows NT had a POSIX-compliant layer for a while, and Services for UNIX had some licensed IP, but no one would claim that Windows NT was UNIX. See also Lisivka's comments [2] further down: Linux is not UNIX. See also the Single UNIX Specification[3]. 1. http://www.opengroup.org/subjectareas/platform/unix http://www.opengroup.org/subjectareas/platform/unix 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13204551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13204551 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification
  - 10y ago