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Comment by damnitbuilds | Hacker News Reader

"MinC is a Unix emulator for Windows, based on the OpenBSD operating system. MinC was written to help children at vocational education learn Linux"

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At my University I heard things like "Linux is derived Unix, BSD variants are something else entirely". I think education people are confused in general about this topic.

That's hilarious. It sounds like you know, but for anyone who doesn't, it's actually the opposite. BSD variants are derived from Unix--that's where the BSD comes from, it was the Berkley Software Distribution of Unix tools, that later implemented the rest of Unix so universities could use the same software without having to worry about licensing from Bell Labs.

Linux is something else entirely, a student's project to make a MINIX compatible kernel, usually packaged with the GNU operating system, which like BSD aimed to be Unix compatible, but notably is not Unix (It's right there in the name: GNU's Not Unix).

>usually packaged with the GNU operating system

It's usually packaged as a part of the Android operating system. GNU hasn't been the popular userspace for a long time.

Except in datacenters.

The operating system interface that Unix, BSD and Linux share is called POSIX. The term POSIX is not widely known, so people sometimes make up for it by using "Linux" in-place because it is the most popular implementation.

This explains people who argue that Android is not Linux, despite it featuring a Linux kernel and self-identifying as so: They are intending to say that Android is not POSIX.

We need to make POSIX (as concept/word) more popular.

Especially to package writers that assume bash is available everywhere, hope that bin/sh is the same as bin/ksh...sed -i... not on unices, grep missing a ton of options....

Time to ask an AI ?

It's never going to happen. POSIX has been around for 4 decades now. The longer something is not popular, the lower its chances to ever become popular.

The name might not be popular, but POSIX has long won. Everybody knows printf.

The thread is about the name.

If you can get the exact quotes, please send them to Computer Stupidities:

http://rinkworks.com/stupid/

As an obligatory warning, if you have never seen Computer Stupidities previously, expect to lose a day reading it.

Yes. Teaching anything to children is to start simple. So I start with bare-bone UNIX. In their second year we move to Linux (all flavours). For their final exam in the third year, they must be able to use Suze Linux.

What is Suze Linux? Did you mean Suse Linux? I would suggest dropping Linux from the description since this has nothing to do with the Linux kernel. Perhaps you could write POSIX instead.

Wouldn't it be easier to use WSL? Microsoft has done al the hard work in getting native Linux code to run on Windows. I don't know how bare-bones you want it to be, but if you install Debian in WSL without extra packages, that seems pretty bare-bone to me. And it seems to me you avoid unnecessary friction from switching from OpenBSD to Linux later on.

WSL requires Windows 10 or 11 though.

Installing WSL was much harder than 'download and double click EXE' when I last did it. The 'app' shop installed something botched I now can't easily get rid of and then I had to do a few Powershell incantations to actually get an install that boots a Linux-like terminal. If I had to use Linux under Windows more than a few hours per year I'd Hyper-V it instead.

I'd also guess 'telemetry' pumps out all one does in WSL, while this might leak less of what the kids are doing.

I doubt that, since telemetry slows things down and it has been found that software runs faster under WSL than native Windows. A quick search found this, which shows a substantial performance difference for the same thing between native Windows and WSL:

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/vtc0fy/wsl2_faster_th...

There have been others who observed the same in the past (and with WSL1), although I do not have a list. I recall reading libc telemetry hooks on Windows that are absent as being claimed to be the cause, but I cannot find the page where I read that. The Reddit post has the alternative suggestion that process creation speed is the cause.

Suggesting that the entirety of the performance difference between Windows and WSL is due to telemetry is by far the weirdest MICROS~1 apologia I've come across.

Performance on my bare metal Linux machines is even better. Do you consider this to be sufficient proof that WSL has telemetry hooked into it?

No, since Windows is less efficient in general.

OK, so you agree that your argument was flawed.

Installing WSL2 as of the latest versions of Windows is as simple as "wsl --install" to get a basic Ubuntu install set up. It'll do all the steps, including turning on all necessary Windows features, in a single command.

And you’re still locked in the Microsoft ecosystem.

Seems to me, that to some Linux has come to mean all things Unix-ly

Yes it seems to be misused that wat - now just try to rerun scripts on macOS or BSD when the author thinks Linux is all there is.

That's usually caused by assuming that everything is bash, which is not true even for Linux.

While that may certainly arise if someone is lazy about #!/bin/sh when they didn't really mean /bin/sh I'd bet it's /bin/sed and similar friends that are different between the GNU versions and the BSD versions. So much make-macro-trickery out there when one is trying to use -i without a backup suffix, and I have no idea why GNU tried to be a trailblazer with their parsing :(

Yes - I come from an era when I used multiple Unixes and for several of them default shell was (t)csh.

Don't assume anything in shells except POSIX sh.

Unfortunately there are people who think Linux is the only way.

If you want to communicate to people wanting to learn "the linux" that this (to a close approximation) does this, with very few words, you could do worse.

After all, if you learned to do "linux" on OpenBSD you'd be pretty much at home on Linux, too.

It's a clever bit of SEO, too, mashing in Cygwin, Linux and OpenBSD in the copy.

I learned to do "linux" on SunOS 4.1, and I feel less at home on Linux and more like a guest in my grandchildren's house.

Huh. This was my entry point as well, but I find Linux very aligned with my feelings about the 4.1 experience, as opposed to Solaris which felt clunky and overbuilt. Of course this is purely subjective emotional stuff I'm talking about.

Yes, the switch to Solaris was definitely abrupt. But the current BSDs feel more like SunOS 4 to me than Linux does. Though to be honest, I do use Linux more than any of the BSDs these days.

Speaking of Cygnus:

The Worst Job in the World, from Michael Tiemann <tiemann@cygnus.com>:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/slowlari...

PS: Fuck Trump supporting anti-vaxer Scott "You have zero privacy, get over it" McNealy. May he run Solaris in hell.

Scott McNealy has long been one of Trump’s few friends in Silicon Valley:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Scott-McNealy-h...

Former Sun Micro CEO Scott McNealy, known for his provocative quotes, says Trump is doing a 'spectacular job' amid the coronavirus crisis. That's not how many tech experts see it:

https://www.businessinsider.com/scott-mcnealy-praises-trumps...

Sun on Privacy: "Get Over It":

https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/

If you assume Windows machine as a starting point, you'll need to answer "Why not WSL?". I can think of good answers, but this would be good to document somewhere.

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