Comment by zxcvcxz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zxcvcxz | Hacker News Reader

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Totally agree. People forget that Linux is the dominant kernel/os because it dominates nearly every market that isn't the desktop (server/mobile/IoT/toasters). On stack overflow dev survey they show about 21% of devs on SO use Linux, compared to regular desktop usage which is a generous 2% that's a 10-fold increase of Linux on the desktop among developers compared to the general populace.

OS X also experiences about a 2-fold increase whereas windows experiences a large decrease in use amongst developers compared to its general desktop usage. I think Windows should just switch to the Linux kernel and build Windows container to run legacy programs and port all their software to Linux if they want to win over devs. The "bash on Windows" doesn't appeal to me at all.

Of course, here on hacker news the culture is really more corporate than hacker.

  People forget that Linux is the dominant
  kernel/os because it dominates nearly every
  market that isn't the desktop

People also forget that Linux came to prominence once backed by corporations having and a (valid, IMHO) agenda to not be controlled by Microsoft. The severe OEM and license agreements negotiated in the late 80's and 90's certainly motivated R&D into alternatives.

And people forget that there are other very popular markets[0] using other toolsets[1].

So, when you say:

  here on hacker news the culture is really
  more corporate than hacker.

It seems to create a paradox.

0 - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/16/sony_playstation_4_k...

1 - https://wiki.freebsd.org/Myths

Yeah but *BSD isn't nearly as wide spread as Linux.

  Yeah but *BSD isn't nearly as wide
  spread as Linux.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

> People forget that Linux is the dominant kernel/os because it dominates nearly every market that isn't the desktop (server/mobile/IoT/toasters).

This is mostly correct while referring to the kernel. Nevertheless, a kernel by itself is just one component of the low level system. And I personally definitely do not consider the Android experience a "GNU/Linux" one - even the base libc is replaced with a quite broken (e.g wrt POSIX) Bionic. This is leaving aside all the firmware issues, lack of administrator control without "rooting", etc.

So in other words: it is natural to "forget" that Linux is widespread on mobile devices, simply because the experience is extremely different.

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