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Comment by wyqydsyq | Hacker News Reader

> I had to check that this wasn't an April fool's day post. Linux powers a large proportion of servers on the internet, and has done so for a long time now. The popularity of Git is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Linux might be used for the majority of web servers, sure, however Git is used for version controlling the significant majority of software produced today. I would argue something that is used by nearly every software development team/company across the entire planet has a much greater impact than something that is used by nearly every server across the planet.

Linux also sees more heavy competition from the likes of Windows and *BSD, where git has essentially dominated it's market with things like CVS, SVN and Mercurial becoming increasingly abandoned, and only niche proprietary systems like Perforce still competing for usage

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It's got a big impact, but mercurial was released pretty much the same month as git. Git got more popular, likely helped by Linus already being known. If we didn't get git, we'd use something else without issues. And you can use something else right now. Linux on the other hand just doesn't have an alternative equal in features.

> Linux on the other hand just doesn't have an alternative equal in features.

The absolute disrespect towards microkernels. Shameful.

Or BSDs.

Is there any microkernel distribution right now which supports cuda? Or hardware-offloaded network drivers?

I'm not sure I agree. git has a particularly lucid underlying data model which is the reason why it has endured so long (despite its objectively awful ux), and still sets the bar for cryptographically secure SCMs.

The model is the same as mercurial with bookmarks.

"Linux on the other hand just doesn't have an alternative equal in features."

BSD?

Two cases that BSD can't do - cuda, docker. For many purposes, you can't have a drop in replacement for Linux the same way you can with git / hg.

"Heavy competition" is overselling the threat that Linux faces from Windows in the Internet server space. I'd go with something like "Linux roundly dominates, save for some legacy environments that have largely been picked off by cryptolocker breaches over the last several years."

> Linux also sees more heavy competition from the likes of Windows and *BSD,

No it doesn’t. Neither of them are even a consideration in most server scenarios at tech companies. Anecdotally, every company I’ve worked at used Linux in multiple forms (severs, embedded, etc) but not all of them used git (Google is the most well-known example).

Every tech company I've worked at used Linux for servers as well, however that doesn't mean I'm ignorant of the huge number of (predominantly large enterprise) corporations relying on the Windows Server stack. Also I would argue there are significantly more servers, embedded devices and especially networking infrastructure running *BSD than you give it credit for, not to mention every consumer device manufactured by Apple.

How many open source projects or tech companies can you cite using an SCM suite other than Git, except for Google which you already mentioned?

The huge disparity in usage makes it pretty clear Git is the only widely relevant SCM suite today. GitHub and GitLab are arguably the most active and central hubs of open source communities, and they're based on Git. Bitbucket discontinued Mercurial support a while ago. How many popular / impactful public code hosting repositories are primarily using SCMs other than Git? I'd be surprised if you can name a single one other than Google's now discontinued Google Code service.

It depends on your success measure. There are way more Android users for example (most smartphone users), or people who interact with Linux servers (basically every person on the www), than people who use git (developers, a niche profession). The first two categories contain billions of humans, while the last category includes maybe a couple dozen million or so.

Netflix use FreeBSD. Many ISP in 90s use FreeBSD or Solaris.

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