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Comment by nix23 | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, Linux is also not highly visible, sure for the HN-Community it is. But for normal Customers? They know Android, Windows, MacOS..that's it.

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Well... tell somebody you run a Unix operating system instead of Windows or Mac and keep notes on how many people say “Oh, you mean Linux?” Keep a smaller piece of paper for all the combined responses of “Oh, you mean [Open|Free|Net|Dragon Fly]BSD?” I’d be surprised if you need that second piece of paper at all.

Written as a satisfied NetBSD user.

I would actually think you run Unix and would never question them. If they know the word Unix they probably aren't confusing it with linux.

Hehe true, if they know whats Unix is, they ask probably MacOS, Solaris, Hp-UX, AIX, or OpenServer/Unixware...but for sure not Linux or any BSD.

> Unix operating system instead of Windows or Mac

macOS is a BSD, just buried under layers of proprietary UI, tracking, and DRM

And a different kernel.

Yes and no. The XNU kernel is, to oversimplify greatly, BSD glued into Mach. At least historically, it had BSD kernel code in it. And it continues to implement many BSD APIs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU

Well Android is a Linux distro with a kernel patchset for smartphones.

I had assumed "comeback" meant in the backend server space.

It's the back- and frontend of MANY services, like apache foundation, and add FreeNAS it's even much more.

I'm not disputing that. But it seems like it's lost some of the C10K type usage as the Linux network stack and libraries have gotten better.

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