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Comment by childintime | Hacker News Reader

Why would they want to do that? Why adopt something that is on its way to the museum?

> Why would they want to do that? Why adopt something that is on its way to the museum?

The Unix kernel is one of the most widely deployed in the world. I don't think it's going anywhere in the next 100 years.

> The Unix kernel

Which one? Linux?

By that logic Windows NT kernel won't go anywhere in 100 years either, since it runs on nearly a billion devices.

Neither is MVS going anywhere, even though it has evolved into z/OS.

I'm pretty sure there will be a workloads running on NonStop well into the 21st century too.

So, there's no reason to think we will be free of Windows anytime soon either.

Linux was heavily inspired by Unix but it's not Unix in any sense.

Rest of Unix certified implementations are however not widely deployed. I don't see many AIX, Solaris production machines anywhere since everyone often deploys Linux instead.

Same story applies to *BSD family.

The only thing that keeps the Unix identity on those system is the Posix interface which is also extremely outdated on modern systems and it's kept around as a legacy.

Linux is Unix in the sense it implements most of the same core ideas in a similar way. The same applies to macOS, which is a layer of BSD on top of a Mach microkernel. All those systems have much more in common between themselves than anything else.

macOS is actually a certified UNIX, the rest being enterprise OSes most people will never see.

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