[Talk] using other *nix like os(s)

[Nick Simicich]

On Sat, 2006-12-16 at 15:12, Terry Richards wrote:
> has anyone experience with other Linux like systems?

Linux is a "Unix Like" system, and I believe that it has some sort of
Posix rating. I'm not sure if it is legally Unix, I think it might be.

If you are asking about Linux like as "Free Software, Unix like
supporting X", then, well, there are a number of those.

> i fooled around with BeOS for a while and thought quite highly of it. 
> unfortunetly there wasn't enough behind the effort to make it a better 
> choice than Linux, much less  MacOSX which is what i mainly use. the 
> opendarwin and fink systems <?> were a big plus in my decision to use a 
> tibook for my main desktop. anyway i was wondering if anybelly here also 
> used any flavor of  BSD or plan 9 or anything else like that with success...

It is sort of amusing that at one point, writing an OS was considered
hard.  Then there was Minix, and Linux, and BSD was rewritten as all
free code, and BeOS was freed, and Hurd seems to be continuing the
development of Mach that might have been the follow-on to OS/2. (Of
course, this was all facilitated by the FSF - who wisely noted that the
hard part were all the tools and who sponsored people writing essentials
like cp and gawk and bash and so forth and a decent C compiler and
linker so that binaries can be built - all those things we need to have
a real OS with a useful command line and the ability to craft useful
tools quickly, and which do not need to be recreated by everyone who
works on a new free OS - heck, Cygwin almost makes Windows a reasonable
command line platform, for end users.

As the FSF has pointed out in the past, the proper term is not "Linux
like" but GNU/Linux - and also GNU/BSD - because all these things are
based on a ton of free software that is given a framework by by GNU -
and would otherwise only be available as part of (whoever owns Unix this
month)'s Unix distribution - or something derived from it.

When you use Linux, you are, of course, using the Linux core. But you
only rarely use things that are only part of Linux - most of the things
you actually use are part of X - and run on many platforms, or are part
of some other free software project and run on many platforms, or,
surprisingly frequently, are part of the GNU core and are part of almost
every free software operating system distribution that exists today.

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