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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

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chrisseaton·

Why do you think Windows isn’t a real OS? It successfully powers I’d guess hundreds of millions of devices.

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To be fair, Linux powers quite literally billions of devices

And a hundred million isn't enough to be real?

It is a joke to say that it is not a real OS.

But if you want to argue: You could say that a 'real OS' must be 'mostly POSIX-compliant' [1]. That way most other OS (Linux, MacOS, iOS) but not Windows would be included in your definition of a 'real OS' ;-)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX#Mostly_POSIX-compliant

I wouldn’t get why POSIX is the only way to design an OS.

It’s not. It’s an API. IBM’s zOS has a POSIX-compliant Unix subsystem and it has absolutely nothing to do with Unix under its hood.

It is not.

But that way you could pretend to have an objective definition of the term 'real OS' and exclude Windows while including most other major OS.

Windows is mostly posix compliant as it had a POSIX subsystem until 2000, then it had Windows Services for UNIX/Interix and now days has Windows Subsystem for Linux.

regardless of anything else, windows is older than posix... so posix should arguably be windows compliant :P

And those Windows boxes wouldn’t be able to do much without the ones Linux powers, but that’s beside the point: Windows is an OS. It’s quirky and feels weird for the Unix crowd, but a lot of it will be oddly familiar to the VMS elders.

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