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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Well, the meaningful way for UNIX (and Linux) to succeed as a popular product, according to the aspirations of its proponents, was on the desktop. It wasn't just about the server side back then (late 90s, early 00s) it was all about taking over Windows.

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.

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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.

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.

> daemonic operating system

I've never seen someone refer to it like that before. Awesome.

>the PlayStation 4 runs FreeBSD

wait, what?

Awesome.

>The fact that the PlayStation 4 runs FreeBSD has resulted in a large number of improvements becoming available to us

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!

The fact that the PS4 runs FreeBSD has been written about extensively. The contributions they've made, less so... mainly because most of the work they did was before they announced that they were using FreeBSD, and they went to significant lengths to avoid that information leaking out (e.g., shell companies were set up so that code could be contributed without revealing the ultimate source).

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.

They talked a bit about it on their LLVM talks.

http://llvm.org/devmtg/2013-11/#talk8

The only successful desktop UNIX derivative is MacOS. That ship has sailed.

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.

Chromebooks are very successful, outselling MacOS desktops in 2016. They run a pretty standard Linux environment.

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.

>Chromebooks are very successful, outselling MacOS desktops in 2016.

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.

Chromebooks provide access to the underlying Linux distribution, after doing a magic incantation that the common user doesn't have any idea about.

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.

You're right, according to the the US stats I saw. I probably forgot about them because I never saw one (Italy here) or if I saw them I mistaken them for a Windows laptop. However I think I never heard the word Chromebook in a conversation, either work or friends. We could use a Chromebook everywhere we're connecting to the Internet with our laptops but apparently we're not.

Chromebooks like you mentioned is a Linux environment, a unix like clone. MacOS is a certified unix OS.

It would be a bigger win if the success of Linux on mobile wasn't built on a heaping pile of GPL violations. It's all well and good that my phone runs Linux, but if I don't have Stallman's Four Freedoms on it and the device drivers aren't contributed back, what exactly is the point?

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.

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