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Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

This guy gets it.

I think the most interesting idea in this space would be the following.

Try to consider how locked down and garbage both Windows and Apple desktops would be if it weren't for the pressure and innovation of the Linux desktop(s).

This is where I realized the Linux Desktop is "winning" -- or at least doing exactly what it should be doing and is doing an exemplary job of it; being the free example that's coming to eat your lunch and keeping everyone else honest and quality. True competition.

It's roughly similar to the difference between email and Twitter. It's not great that email is very centrally controlled by gmail et al, but a hell of a lot better than the Twitter trashfire.

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> Try to consider how locked down and garbage both Windows and Apple desktops would be if it weren't for the pressure and innovation of the Linux desktop(s).

I tried but I can't say I can imagine anything on the Windows or MacOS desktops that are influenced by pressure from Linux desktop tbh. What are the things you are thinking about?

Virtual Desktops have come straight from Linux.

CLIs, which are becoming increasingly more supported and important on both Windows and MacOS are thanks to Linux. Windows is a really straightforward example of this where Powershell has aliased a bunch of Linux commands to the powershell command (e.g. grep is an Alias for Select-String in powershell).

Window management features are being driven by Linux. The most successful example of this is tiling window functionality driven largely by tiling window managers from the Linux world.

Developers on both Windows and MacOS depend on package management software picked up straight from Linux, such as chocolatey/scoop in the former and brew with the latter.

Almost every Windows and Mac software is developed using git. Git was literally invented for writing Linux.

The list goes on, but Windows and MacOS have a lot to thank Linux for.

Linux has also been a major pillar of open source in general. Much of the open source software ecosystem depends on Linux and the development and philosophy around it to sustain it.

> Virtual Desktops have come straight from Linux.

Pretty sure I was using virtual desktops in CDE in 1995. At the time GNU/Linux had extremely limited, if any, desktops.

> CLIs, which are becoming increasingly more supported and important on both Windows and MacOS are thanks to Linux.

CLI's predate Linux by quite some time! DOS, heck Windows 1.0, was essentially a CLI application! Those 'Linux' commands are part of the GNU suite, named for various UNIX programs that they emulate.

> Developers on both Windows and MacOS depend on package management software picked up straight from Linux, such as chocolatey/scoop in the former and brew with the latter.

Can't speak for Windows, but Mac package managers have been around for longer than brew has existed and certainly as long as OS X/macOS has been in existence. Fink (2000) and Macports (2002) spring to mind. The two oldest package managers are dpkg, closely followed by FreeBSD ports in 1994. Everything else is post 2000, barring perhaps RPM and APT.

> Almost every Windows and Mac software is developed using git. Git was literally invented for writing Linux.

Git was invented not for writing Linux, but to maintain the source because BitKeeper screwed the community over. It won mindshare off the back of that because it wasn't CVS or SVN.

This comment is what is bad for Linux. A lot of us old-timers were around for all of this, and before GNU/Linux was a twinkling in the eyes of their founders. Yes, there has been a lot of positive contributions from Linux and the community, but can we please stop presenting it as some sort of panacea? It very definitely isn't.

To add to your points, since macOS is BSD derived, certainly the BSD package manager inspired it more (hence also why MacPorts is popular too from 2002 onwards)

Also, I agree with your last point. Comments like theirs are endemic of having too much of a hyper focus on what one is passionate about, and causing folks to miss seeing the bigger picture. There’s also a heavy recency bias involved.

No.

Stop being old and grumpy and join in instead.

No one outside of here much cares about the fine grained differences between GNU/Linux and Unix and they mostly shouldn't have to.

The more important part is that the general spirit (strongly buttressed by the GPL and Stallman, I'd argue, more than anything else but we can debate) represents a better and smarter way of looking at computing than letting everything we do get taken over overly greedy companies. There's some need for "capitalism" for sure, but this was the more important part.

I think it’s a bit rude to call them old and grumpy for accurately calling out inaccuracies in the other persons comments.

The GPL’nes of it all didn’t even factor into the other posters comments about feature influence, and I’d argue that it’s not a factor in influencing Windows/Mac at a regular consumer level.

Clearly the GP does as they cite it a things that they think come directly from Linux and/or it's influenced general computing. I'm just setting them straight on few things.

Some of your points are odd here.

Virtual Desktops predate Linux, and were part of Parc systems. They’re a feature of X, but we’re featured on non X systems as well. Macs had a form of it in MultiFinder before Linux was around and much like many UI elements on the Mac (and everything else really), was more influenced by Xerox.

CLIs also predate the existence of Linux. In fact all the other OSs started out as CLI heavy/only and then moved to adding a UI. The main CLI systems are posix/Unix based not Linux based.

There’s a lot to thank Linux for, or more specifically Linus (for git), but I’d also just take some care in which examples you pick. A lot of these systems have shared influences

Sure, but I'd argue that the most useful way to talk about this is, especially to the rest of the world is START WITH:

"Linux is awesome and this is where all the good things in computers come from"

Start with that carrot. Yes, it's reductive and an oversimplification. Do it anyway.

Later on, you can get into the "actually's," -- actually Unix, actually GPL, actually GNU/Linux, actually Android isn't, blah blah.

I don’t think I understand your point. If I understand correctly, you’re advocating for dishonesty to push Linux as an agenda?

It's in no way dishonesty anymore than any other nerd debate. I know we like the idea of things having precise definitions, but the reality is they often don't, even in our field.. Much like "Object Oriented Programming" or "Agile" or whatnot, people literally do have different definitions of what "Linux" is.

I teach in IT, often to students unfamiliar with it. If I came in the class and the first thing I'm doing is stopping and correcting people with "you should really say GNU/Linux instead of Linux," we ain't gettin' nowhere.

I do that part, just later.

honestly I have zero idea what point you’re trying to make. The person said those things originated in Linux or were inspired by it. They’re wrong and were corrected thusly.

You seem to want to let them believe they’re correct and spread that incorrectness because it pushes the ideal of Linux?

Almost? I'm arguing that "Linux" is ambiguous and that what a lot of people think of as "Linux" is shorthand for "open and not like what we're used to with Apple and Windows and also almost universally uses actual Linux code and tools as the software."

Let's try this. If I said "I really like the Apple experience" -- what do you think of?

I can tell you what you're not thinking of: You're NOT thinking of my experience with an Apple II and the freedom of owning a machine and programming in Basic and getting the computer to do what I want. So if I get all uppity and say "What all of you are saying is Apple really isn't THE REAL APPLE" -- sure, to me it's true. Also mostly doesn't matter.

But…this is all irrelevant? Nothing you just said is related to what the thread was about.

You somehow fabricated a random discussion point into the mix? Perhaps you mixed up threads with someone else who was talking about the differentiation of types of Linux, GNU etc??

Even then, I’m still not sure what you’re trying to say. It all seems so ephemeral and hand wavy to me, but I’m genuinely trying to understand what you’re getting at.

Some of those are stretch to call pressure and innovation (CLI? It's old as computing). Some of those are perhaps coming from "pressure" from Linux (some tiling possibilities).

Then you go on to confuse developer tools with desktop.

To say MacOS/Windows desktops would not be what they are today without Linux is absolutely laughable.

Original Macintosh HIGs from 1980s had more innovation on each page with regards to desktop than Linux has had since its inception.

The one thing that I experienced on Linux for the first time was multiple workspaces. Does that come from MacOS or Windows? I haven’t used anything other than Linux in over a decade.

That comes from old Unix workstations with CDE et al

This is one of those things that's so prevalent that it's kind of hard to even say.

One quick example: Look at every version of Windows from Vista to 10, and then look at what KDE was already looking like at the time. Hard to not see major influence.

Vista is 2006. In 2006 KDE was version 3.5 and hopelessly cosplaying a WinXP theme.

KDE 4 from 2008 was hopelessly cosplaying MacOS.

So yeah. Influences are very apparent.

>keeping everyone else honest and quality

If public opinion is to be considered, Windows gets worse by the time. Ads, forced updates, questionable UI decisions, ...

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