Hacker News Reader

Comment by jff | Hacker News Reader

I'm getting really sick of people calling this kind of thing an Operating System. If your first step is "Install Linux", it's not an operating system. It might be a meta-operating system or something like that, but we've had a pretty standard definition of what constitutes an OS for decades now.

View on HN

Not an operating system in traditional terms. but it certainly is operating a system, on a higher level. Plus, life is too short to be offended by what people call their product.

I operate systems myself, but that doesn't make me an operating system.

Operating system operator then.

I'd probably call it an operating environment (like e.g. DESQview).

NEB (No Expert But...) Isn't Linux just the kernel?

On the page they think comparable systems to Circuit are CoreOS, and Consul and Mesosphere.

What I'm trying to say is this: are not all of these "linux installed" with some additional stuff thus making them an operative system (distro is it??

Micro kernels and and OS personalities were once a think in Mach. Today, the micro kernel is simply called Linux (ironic since Linux was designed explicitly to not be a micro kernel).

What? Microkernels have a specific definition too, and Linux most certainly is not one.

Yes, that is the irony: Linus wanted Linux to be the anti-micro kernel OS, and it winds up 20+ years later being what people prefer to layer higher level OS's on.

Well, he never intended for it not to be a kernel, which is what higher level operating systems are built on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com