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Comment by mikorym | Hacker News Reader

Are there any HN readers here that use MINIX or possibly another OS that does not have the Linux kernel? I'm not about to argue pros/cons but would like to see peoples' use cases; my own use cases have not necessitated using anything more complicated than Ubuntu, and quite happily so.

Still, I think from my interest point of view it would be interesting to not only understand the Linux kernel better, but also other OS design paradigms.

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I swear by OpenBSD. I use it on my home server. I use it to write C code (their C standard library has a few very nice things, such as arc4random, strl{cat,cpy}, explicit_bzero, timingsafe_memcmp, libtls, and other things that I run into often enough that I don't want to think about them before I start adding portability stuff).

Of course, it's not much of an option for anything I require proprietary software.

Openbsd has opened my eyes to how deficient documentation is in Linux.

Meaning it has good documentation?

+1 for OpenBSD. For C, it’s the nicest platform around. I love the system man pages and the like you said, they have a lot of nice system and library functions to use as well.

Also it’s pretty easy to copy the C stuff to new OSes as well for portability.

> Are there any HN readers here that use MINIX or possibly another OS that does not have the Linux kernel?

Like... Windows?

To be fair, Windows has the Linux kernel (WSL 2).

It's just a compatibility layer satisfying the kernel API (= syscalls). It's an API on top of the Windows kernel.

That's WSL 1 you're thinking about.

Crazy, wsan't aware of this. I stand corrected

Wsl2 has complete kernel not just syscall translation

Which is basically a VM. It's not that the Windows kernel isn't running even when using WSL.

I’m setting up a SmartOS server on a little NUC right now and loving it. Zones are very nice, pkgsrc package manager is better than I expected, man pages wonderfully written, even ipfilter feels more elegant than iptables. Service and zone admin very well thought out. It feels much more like a cohesive /system/ than say fedora or Ubuntu.

Can run Linux without virtualization (native performance via syscall translation) in a zone if I hit any issues, which I’ve not yet (simple web stack).

Google around for some of Bryan Cantrill’s talks on smartos. Solaris derivative. He’s been quite critical of several linux engineering decisions and what he frames as sloppy thinking in the kernel community.

I found this helpful/inspiring - https://timboudreau.com/blog/smartos/read - if you follow his example be sure to change dataset_uuid to image_uuid in the zone manifest.

> Are there any HN readers here that use MINIX or possibly another OS that does not have the Linux kernel?

I have both macOS and Ubuntu on my MacBook. I have always predominantly used macOS for all my day-to-day uses and only use Ubuntu to test software that needs to run on Linux before releasing.

I have known many people who use FreeBSD or OpenBSD daily and I have even heard some people installing Haiku as a secondary OS because they have now found it 'very interesting' to use.

I don't know anyone using MINIX though, but I believe that Fuchsia looks like one of the most technically interesting new OSes to be developed in terms of OS design paradigms.

> Are there any HN readers here that use MINIX or possibly another OS that does not have the Linux kernel?

I use macOS all the time. My use-case is systems programming.

I also uses iOS on my phone.

Or is that not what you meant?

I don't know if you go through old comments, but for your reference:

"Mac OS X is sort of microkernelish. Inside, it consists of Berkeley UNIX riding on top of a modified version of the Mach microkernel. Since all of it runs in kernel mode (to get that little extra bit of performance) it is not a true microkernel, but Carnegie Mellon University had Berkeley UNIX running on Mach in user space years ago, so it probably could be done again, albeit with a small amount of performance loss, as with L4Linux. Work is underway to port the Apple BSD code (Darwin) to L4 to make it a true microkernel system." [1]

[1] https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/reliable-os/

I assume you mean Open Source, and that would exclude Windows and macOS. Apart from MINIX which we now know lives on every Intel chips, there are BSDs, NetBSD on Apple AirPort, FreeBSD on Netflix Open Appliance, Playstation, even Solaris is still being developed worked on. L4 is used in every Apple SoC with Secure Enclave.

And many many others.

There's always the BSDs.

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