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Comment by johnklos | Hacker News Reader

It's a shame that a whole generation of people who want to be IT literate think that this is "Linux". This is Unix.

Would we name a map book "A Toyota Roadmap", as if we don't know that there are other cars, and that a map applies to cars, not just to Toyotas specifically? Sure, a map would be different for push scooters (Windows), but a map would be the same for cars and small trucks.

It seems petty, but it becomes difficult to make a distinction between what's generally Unix and what's actually specifically Linux when we just call everything Linux.

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> It's a shame that a whole generation of people who want to be IT literate think that this is "Linux". This is Unix.

Is it though?

Disclaimer: I am an old Unix hand (a literal graybeard). I started using Unix back in the mid 1980s, when a dual VAX 11/780 was hot stuff. I've used most of the major Unix distributions that ever existed.

In terms of server market share [1], Unix these days is, like, 95% Linux in various distros, with Windows, Free/Open/NetBSD, Illuminos, and a few others rounding out the top 10.

We can and should honor the past, and the innovators that made today's compute environment possible. But in a sense, "Unix" is a historical legacy, and denying that isn't useful.

[1] Because outside of some hobbyists, who is running traditional Unix on the desktop these days? Desktop "Unix" is really OSX and Linux these days.

I think by that analogy the title should have been "Computer Operating Systems Terminal Tools". The tools presented in the slides have been tested on a Linux System, which motivated the title name.

That would be incorrect: it's too general. These tools don't apply to Windows; yet some do apply to MacOS, due to its BSD/UNIX (not Linux) roots.

there are many ways in which these do apply on Windows, these days.

please work on separating the semantics of someone's statement from the pragmatics. don't bother with the "how they phrased it" bit, and instead try to focus on the "what are they trying to say" part more. you may be, like I did all too often in my youth, over-emphasizing English correctness, missing the message being communicated entirely.

maybe you're not doing that! maybe you are. only you can know for sure. if you are, then try to work on that. it will help you communicate and it will help others communicate with you. we all grow as people over time, and no one is flawless, and that's fine. just try to be better every day.

Honestly? When you tell me what to think about and improve, you come across as condescending. Maybe you didn't mean to? Either way, you should try to work on that.

I think the reason that it seems petty is that distinction is just not useful information for most people. It’s at best a historical asterisk on whatever is being discussed. I don’t use Unix, and I don’t know anyone that uses Unix. Linux tools seems right to me because, I get the tools from whatever flavor of Linux OS I installed.

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