How do you define "popularity"? UNIX is found in many devices end users don't think of as being "computers" at all.
The best software is the software users don't even realize is there, because it just works.
The best software is the software users don't even realize is there, because it just works.
If somebody uses some hardware product (e.g. set top box) and doesn't know its Linux, then it's no big win for the Linux community.
And it's not just necessarily that users don't realize it's there because "it just works", either.
The set top box, for example, can be buggy or crappy but just not provide neither a way to dive in and fix it, nor branding related to Linux.
I have to disagree there. It may not be a marketing win, but that doesn't mean that there are no other benefits. The fact that the PlayStation 4 runs FreeBSD has resulted in a large number of improvements becoming available to us; whether Johnny knows that his games are running on a daemonic operating system is of very little relevance.
I've never seen someone refer to it like that before. Awesome.
wait, what?
Awesome.
Is there a writeup of this anywhere? If stuff has been backported/upstreamed/whatever from the PS4 to the freeBSD kernel that would truly be living the dream!
Probably the most easily identifiable contributions are in LLVM; Sony is one of the largest contributors to that project, and it's entirely due to the PS4.
However the most relevant computing devices for consumers are phones and tablets nowadays, not desktops. UNIX derivatives run almost all of them. Big success, I'd say.
UNIX derivatives are running most servers too and are making inroads into the Windows desktop. The outlook is good unless a new popular market suddenly open with no meaningful *nix presence in it.
I don't think anyone thought Linux to take over the office desktop by mass porting office applications but by moving them to the web. That shift is still happening.
That's still products from multiple vendors (Dell, HP, and Lenovo, Asus?, etc) narrowingly beating sales from a single vendor.
And that (a) in a year when the single vendor had stalled updating their product line, and (b) with the Chromebooks being much cheaper, and more mass market, offerings.
So this speaks more to the slow sales of Chromebooks during the previous years than some major breakthrough.
For the non geek audience, it is a browser based OS. Google could base it in something else, and none of them would notice it.
As for desktops, the market share still slowly creeps up. Desktop Linux has definitely graduated from "uber-nerd" to "power user" territory. Plenty of people I know who aren't particularly into Free Software, UNIX etc dual-boot Ubuntu.
No, Linux is.
http://kernelbook.sourceforge.net/pdf/ch-intro.pdf
Some devices run BSD derivatives, but I'd still hesitate to call those Unix vs derived from Unix.
That pdf btw has quite a few misconceptions about the history of UNIX.
The trademark UNIX® and its specification is (still) tightly controlled[1] and licensing and compliance was far too expensive for Linus to think about it for his tiny Linux-like OS. (A Linux distribution did recently get certified as UNIX® but that's a recent exception.)
There have been multiple lawsuits between different companies about what could be considered UNIX. The original Linux distribution was basically GNU (GNU is NOT UNIX) utilities wrapped around a deliberately non-UNIX kernel called Linux.
Back when people were trying to explain Linux to UNIX users, it was called "UNIX-like" or a UNIX® clone. Now that Linux has clearly eclipsed UNIX, even now no one really calls Linux, "UNIX" or vice-versa. They are very similar but they are different.
There is also another specification called POSIX. Even Windows NT had a POSIX-compliant layer for a while, and Services for UNIX had some licensed IP, but no one would claim that Windows NT was UNIX.
See also Lisivka's comments [2] further down: Linux is not UNIX.
See also the Single UNIX Specification[3].
1. http://www.opengroup.org/subjectareas/platform/unix
"I think the Linux phenomenon is quite delightful, because it draws so strongly on the basis that Unix provided. Linux seems to be among the healthiest of the direct Unix derivatives, though there are also the various BSD systems as well as the more official offerings from the workstation and mainframe manufacturers."
K. Thompson is also using Linux. I think that's the ultimate testament to it being 'Unix', unless you want the trademark for marketing purposes, like Apple does.