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Comment by NhanH | Hacker News Reader

And both Windows and MacOS (and iOS even) was/is still far more successful than Linux. So the conclusion is that Linux could be far greater had it not been remote-only development?

I jest, but this kind of question seems to be far more shallow rather than thought-provoking. If you have a point, it’s probably better to make it than some random seemingly open ended question

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No, I'm genuinely puzzled. Everyone complains about the endless Zoom meetings and the inability of remote workers to get recognition or promotions, yet Linux manages to uphold coding standards and an vision where the project is going, subsystem maintainers are recognized, documentation is generated - all of this over mailing lists. What is the difference?

Windows did many things wrong, but engineering is probably not one of them (there was a test of someone installing an application on win 3.1, after upgrading all the way to windows 10, you can still run it).

For your question, I guess the answer would be along the line of “linux development process can’t scale to more users”. Linux is running on a lot of machines, but the number of human using it is at least a magnitude less than other popular software (I count Fb, google search, gmail into this too). Things like supporting different configurations, newly released hardwares (and 3rd party softwares) are not linux strong point. For example, subsystem maintainers are recognized, but they are not incentivized (and probably can’t afford) to make sure everything works well on hardware they do not own

I would not say either of those are more successful than Linux. Absolutely not. Linux is extremely successful.

Commercially? No. But the value that Linux has given the world is immense.

Right, if you are looking at consumer PC devices, you would be misled to think that Microsoft leads the way, but if you look at things like embedded devices, servers, super computers and smart phones (if Android is considered linux?), then Linux leads the way. Even commercially Linux is pretty strong because it enables very large businesses. AWS makes up the majority of Amazon's profit.

Edit: at link to share of OSes

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

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