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Comment by voidr | Hacker News Reader

If we just counted the kernel, then it is possible that Minix could be the most popular "OS" because it's burnt into every Intel CPU, however it's probably not a helpful metric. If we equate Android with Linux, we can also say that MacOS is the most popular mobile operating system because iOS uses the same kernel as MacOS.

I consider 2 things to be the same OS if they can natively run the same unmodified binary files and if we look at it this way, Linux is on a losing streak: - I cannot download an app on Android and run it on Debian - I cannot compile a program on one version of the same distro and run it on another version of the same distro

The moment I will be able to compile a program that runs on both Arch and Android, we can start adding the stats up, however I doubt tis will happen anytime soon looking at the poor attempts at fixing this.

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>I cannot download an app on Android and run it on Debian

Yes you can on the android emulator. The biggest issue is compu arch in that case.

> I cannot compile a program on one version of the same distro and run it on another version of the same distro

Yes you can for the most part (unless it uses a capability provided by a newer kernel which is super rare and mostly limited to system tools, and less for "apps"). Actually that is what makes containers and flatpak possible. It even works accross different distros as long as cpu arch is the same.

> Yes you can on the android emulator. The biggest issue is compu arch in that case.

I can also download VirtualBox and run all Windows programs, that would mean that all Windows apps are Linux apps?

> Yes you can for the most part

You can't statically link glibc: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues/3392

glibc can break stuff: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/08/valve-dev-understandab...

I had binaries break because the newer version if openssl was put under a slightly different name.

> I can also download VirtualBox and run all Windows programs, that would mean that all Windows apps are Linux apps?

WINE is not even an emulator, or so its name says.

> Yes you can on the android emulator. The biggest issue is compu arch in that case.

If I have to go and install one, I can do that on Windows.

Microsoft even supplies the subsystem [0].

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/windows/android/wsa/

> The moment I will be able to compile a program that runs on both Arch and Android

You can! You will need to have a UI wrapper around it on Android but if you compile it in the right way there’s no reason this can’t work (assuming they use the same CPU architecture of course)

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