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Comment by gargarplex | Hacker News Reader

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gargarplex·

I am not even joking. In the next few years we are going to see Linux on the desktop!

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Not really because what Microsoft is doing is actually GNU/Windows.

Google is busy with ChromeOS/Linux and Android/Linux.

Apple keeps developing their NeXTSTEP/BSD derivative.

I like the precision and clarity of your thinking. Would you be interested in being paid to write freelance blog posts?

No thanks, my hands are already full as it is.

This is actually really interesting. Google doesn't have a kernel so they're borrowing Linux. Microsoft doesn't have a good developer userspace so they're borrowing GNU's.

Not all Windows developers agree with that, though.

>Microsoft doesn't have a good developer userspace

What does this even mean ? They do have the best IDE on the market ( Visual Studio). What they are really lacking is a proper console emulator app, but there is still the excellent ConEmu for this (3rd party , doesn't belong to MS).

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/87625/what-is-diffe...

See, as much as it's a meme at this point, this is really where the GNU/Linux distinction is important. WSL is really GNU/Windows which is probably horrifying and a massive success story for the FSF.

Can you clarify the GNU/Linux distinction with regard to the WSL? I mean... isn't the main WSL layer a flavor of Ubuntu?

Linux is the name of the kernel. It is also used as the name of the kernel plus the userland, which has a lot of GNU code in it (although give Poettering some time and we'll see). WSL is the userland without the kernel.

WSL is running Ubuntu software with the GNU userspace on top of the Windows kernel using a Linux translation layer.

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