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You're setting quite a high bar for innovation if anything that "looks like unix" is not deemed to be innovative. There's plenty of innovation in every modern

You're setting quite a high bar for innovation if anything that "looks like unix" is not deemed to be innovative. There's plenty of innovation in every modern "unixlike" OS. IllumOS, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, to take some common examples, have each taken different paths in different functional areas, and rarely is one objectively worse than any other unless you have the constraint of a particular set of hardware to run the kernel on and/or software to run under the kernel. Filesystems, for instance. ZFS and Btrfs (to a lesser extent, mainly because it's years from being feature complete) are innovative compared to earlier mainstream filesystems. Yet, a typical desktop user would not notice any innovation. Typical users are not concerned with snapshots, sending snapshot diffs between devices, or scrubbing a raid array for errors. ZFS has been criticized for being a resource hog, and both have been criticized for being slow. There are always trade offs. Getting a modern filesystem with COW and block checksums or hashes has performance costs, particularly on rotating disks. The only thing a desktop user will notice about a 5 year old computer running linux or BSD with a ZFS or btrfs filesystem is that it's slow. Slowness isn't innovative, right?

hnriot 13y ago
ZFS - Linus had nothing to do with that! That was Sun. Of course there's kernel innovation, my point was that this is true for all variants - not just Linux which gets all the attention.
- shawn-furyan 13y ago
  >there's really nothing very innovating about Linux >Of course there's kernel innovation :\ Perhaps ease up a bit on the hyperbole, you just took 2 polar opposite positions in the space of as many comments. >ZFS - Linus had nothing to do with that harshreality wasn't saying that Linus had anything to do with ZFS, he was noting it as an example of 'innovation [in something] that "looks like unix"' in order to counter your odd implication that that all unix variants are pretty much the same and devoid of innovation. To break down your argument, you say that: 1 - "Linux isn't innovative" 2 - "It's just another variant" 3 - "Like the myriad of other ones" So Linux isn't innovative, and since all of the other ones (Solaris, BSDs, etc.) are alike, that they are neither innovative. You basically denied that there has been any innovation in Unix since it left Bell Labs. The ZFS example was a counter to that implicit claim.
- Samuel_Michon 13y ago
  As far as UNIX variants go, don’t Apple’s OS X and iOS get way more attention than all the Linux distributions combined?

hnriot 13y ago

ZFS - Linus had nothing to do with that! That was Sun. Of course there's kernel innovation, my point was that this is true for all variants - not just Linux which gets all the attention.

shawn-furyan 13y ago
>there's really nothing very innovating about Linux >Of course there's kernel innovation :\ Perhaps ease up a bit on the hyperbole, you just took 2 polar opposite positions in the space of as many comments. >ZFS - Linus had nothing to do with that harshreality wasn't saying that Linus had anything to do with ZFS, he was noting it as an example of 'innovation [in something] that "looks like unix"' in order to counter your odd implication that that all unix variants are pretty much the same and devoid of innovation. To break down your argument, you say that: 1 - "Linux isn't innovative" 2 - "It's just another variant" 3 - "Like the myriad of other ones" So Linux isn't innovative, and since all of the other ones (Solaris, BSDs, etc.) are alike, that they are neither innovative. You basically denied that there has been any innovation in Unix since it left Bell Labs. The ZFS example was a counter to that implicit claim.
Samuel_Michon 13y ago
As far as UNIX variants go, don’t Apple’s OS X and iOS get way more attention than all the Linux distributions combined?