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Comment by jes5199 | Hacker News Reader

you don’t have to say “in datacenters” when talking about linux, that is the obvious context in the vast majority of cases

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I'm reading this on an Android phone. The phone OS that has over 70% market share.

Linux is a tiny tiny part of the OS on phones. Power usage is most certainly not handled by android or linux in the vast majority of cases.

Who in their right mind would leave something so critical to the success of their product to a general purpose OS designed for mainframes and slightly redesigned for PCs?

Why you think so? Especially for HN readers decent chunk is using Linux.

(I typed this on Linux PC).

Agree. On reading the headline, I was hoping it would extend my laptop battery life.

Same here, I have used Linux as my main for a long time. Though, I would imagine that data centers do have more instances than the desktops and laptops around the world combined.

And another one here!

This is a naming mistake. You're taking "Linux" in the sense of "Linux Distribution", where the various competitors have seen most of their success in the datacenter.

This is specifically a change to the Linux kernel, which is much, much more broadly successful.

IME majority of linux systems are laptops and desktops.

Without looking at stats, I would think android phones.

Android isn't Linux. While Android uses the Linux kernel, it's not a standard Linux distribution. It has its own user space and libraries, making it a distinct operating system.

Linux is the kernel. Android uses a forked version of the mainline Linux

Everyone uses a forked version of the mainline Linux.

Some distributions apply patches to the kernel but they don’t fork it.

This means it's not GNU/Linux, but that's not the only flavor of Linux. Alpine uses busybox and musl instead of GNU userland and glibc, but few would say it's not a Linux distribution.

Linux is a kernel, not an operating system.

It's Android/Linux, not GNU/Linux.

at least inside docker or wsl

Docker wouldn’t be affected by this, the network stack is lower. WSL would, however.

IoT devices would like a word

Indeed he has to.

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