I would be more surprised if 12% of “tech workers” know what Linux is at all.
Fwiw: I work in a call center as basically a more knowledgeable tech for our client facing team to rely on for help and only about 1% of them have any familiarity with Linux in the slightest.
I wonder about the framing of this question, like another comment mentioned, it’s kinda like evolution where MacOS and Linux have a common ancestor, I could see the wording throwing people off.
“Is MacOS based on linux” seems to be the wording used?
I’d bet less would fall for, “Is MacOS a Linux distribution?”
Edit: Ha some people in the comments had similar thoughts, in addition to Linux and Unix being nearly synonymous to all but those who are very into that kind of thing.
Edit again, if anyone else is curious https://youtu.be/jowCUo_UGts
It’d help if Lunduke were to explain the true origin of those things like Ada Lovelace and programming, and Grace Hopper and the moth. And what predated that.
If it’s not POSIX, it’s POS
I’m not that surprised, a lot of people around me dot have a clear picture of what is the relationship between MacOS, Linux and Unix is. So I suppose some of them would guess that Linux is a modern fork of Unix and MacOS based on Unix.
I know a guy who worked on Unix in the '80s and he is very clear that Linux / MacOS are just Unix.
Yes but no. Some folks are purists and feel that the actual code must derive from the original BSD/SysV code.
Sillies! It’s based on GNU!
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as GNU, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. GNU is not an operating system unto itself, but rather a gathering of the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components that together with a Linux kernel comprise a full OS as defined by POSIX.
(Finally it’s the other way around 😆)
GNU/MacOS/TimApple/Proprietary/Unix Which is all apart of the SystemD Operating system
Lunduke sucks. Let’s have some Judeposting instead
macOS is UNIX, certified UNIX actually.
But I mean, if someone had the merest impression of macOS and was very familiar with Linux and never bothered to look any further then I’d understand. Maybe they only played around with macOS a little and saw the terminal app had bash and most all the familiar tools as on Linux. It’s not hard to see why they might’ve thought it’s Linux based.
macOS is a certified UNIX, sure, but according to some 2002 specification, and if you modify your system in such matter that it will be in nearly broken state.
Isnt
zshthe default macos shell?It is now, but it was
bashbefore.But in any case once you start doing anything remotely advanced you’ll find the individual command line utilities are wildly different between macOS and Linux. They seem (are?) much closer to FreeBSD than GNU utilities.
Yea, because Apple is allergic to GPL
Look I love GPL to death but I’m not going to pretend that every OS vendor on the planet needs to give away everything for free.
You can like two things at once, and in my case I love my walled garden, commercial OS for end-user stuff as well as Linux for networking gear and servers. I used desktop Linux for awhile but at the end of the day I like things like Airdrop, AirPlay and the seamlessness of it all.
Honestly, I like BSD operating systems more so than Linux ones despite the licensing arrangements. Linux is open as hell (obviously) but it’s super disorganized. I haven’t found a package manager I like as much as
pkg(especially installing binary packages and compiled from source packages side by side with shared libraries).Looking forward to being downvoted to hell for having a differing view of Linux than all the recent Windows converts.
Closer, maybe. Similar, not.
Yeah, it’s always fun to find out that a standard looking util on osx actually requires weird args and syntax.
I’m mostly used to it now. Though
-ris supported in macOS’rmcommand I still prefer-Rand use it even on Linux where I believe-ris the preferred argument.
It has been since 2019 but before that it was bash.
I just got around to switching last month
They switched to bash in 2003 with Mac OS X 10.3; before that it was tcsh.
I liked tcsh. It was my favourite shell.
why past tense?
I think 10% of people believe nearly anything. It’s basically the rounding error for a survey.
Honestly, if you had asked me 10 minutes ago “Is MacOS based on Linux?” I would have gotten it wrong. But if you asked “Is MacOS based on UNIX or Linux?” I would have gotten it right.
who even cares
Well that explains a lot… 🤦🏻♂️
It’s based on BSD like Mach kernel
Stop posting Lunduke stuff. This dude sucks and has a long history of sucking.
I’ve come across this person’s face randomly but know nothing about them. Could you help the lazy and tell me why he sucks?
Um…phrasing!
Are we still doing phrasing?
Some dude explained below.
12% of people believed JFK was going to be resurrected a year ago or some dumb shit. The point is, more than 1/4 of the population are not smart.
Well it depends where you sit on the bell curve, 1/8 of the population thinks the other 1/8 are fucking stupid, whilst been completely oblivious to the fact that they are in fact also fucking stupid
Oh it’s infamous racist Bryan Lunduke. Is there no rule against posting that guy?
Oh? What did he do
He’s an anti-woke crusader and bigot. A large chunk (probably most) of his “content” is actually about that.
CW all sorts of bigotry
“Best Alternatives to Woke Software”, “Devuan: The Non-Woke Debian Linux Fork”, lots of shit like that.
He loves talking about so-called “reverse racism”, he thinks white people are oppressed in US tech.
Here’s a recent one:
https://lunduke.substack.com/p/meta-ending-del-ending-fact-checking
They [Meta] are allowing criticism of LGTBQ+blublublub issues, including *snicker* the statement that gay people are mentally ill […] and they’re allowing vaccine skepticism on the platform […] and it is, I’m not gonna lie, mildly hilarious.
Wow. I thought a couple of his old Linux Sucks talks were kind of funny, but never knew anything about him personally. Kind of sad to learn he’s an asshole.
doesnt a free and open source operating system fit the definition of “actively attentive to important societal facts and issues” where the issue in question is not having control of your machine?
By its nature isn’t Linux technically woke?
He also says, Palestine supporters and Hamas supporters are, and I quote, one and the same.
I mean the dude is literally Jewish and pro Israeli, it isn’t even surprising he would have an L take like that
I don’t have a list of specific instances on hand. But he was kind of a contrarian voice for a while that I listened to over a decade ago, but in 2016 went in the more anti-woke (anti-CRT in terms of the time) and very reactionary culture war turn.
Just check his video titles.
Even without it, that snark face he uses for the thumbnails are a very big tell.
I see no racism in the video posted?
He can’t chudpost every time, but I’ve listened to him talk with an open mind before and in my opinion his occasional insights are overshadowed by his self-important whinging.
Ahhh give him a break he probably just forgot. If it helps, I’m sure he was thinking something horrible about somebody reasonably nice. /s
Pft, everyone knows macOS is just a fancy DE on top of Hannah Montana Linux
I remember a podcast I used to listen to a long time ago that argued that MS should just make a fork of the Linux kernel and just make the gui work like Windows. Better security and stability, and huge increase in user base with all the normal Linux users seeing it as viable alternative. I thought it was a brilliant idea. Well except Microsoft would likely have figured a way to kill Linux from the inside.
That is the literal opposite of what the world needs.
Windows isn’t a bad OS from a purely technical perspective. If Windows were released as FOSS, I would switch to Windows without hesitation.
The full Microsoft XP source code was leaked and is available for anyone on GitHub; not the same, I know, but it’s atleast NT based. I’ve just always wondered why a community never formed to fork it
Because it’s not legal and no one’s going to develop software for XP. Someone could make and sell security patches for it, but the type of person who still runs XP either doesn’t care enough to buy security patches or it’s running some hardware that isn’t connected to the internet.
There are exactly two games released in the past few years that have XP support, but that was more a flex on the part of the developer then catering to the market. HROT and Zortch are those games if you’re curious.
Are you sure it’s not bad from a technical perspective? I saw a story from a former programmer talking about how changes would be made the to the interface in the new settings app that’s trying to replace control panel and the shit was like a horror story.
You could keep the kernel tho while changing the gui
The windows kernel isn’t all that great, particularly in the realm of memory security or scheduling.
You know, to each their own. Question is really whether windows maintaining a closed source kernel even makes sense from a maintenance burden perspective when it really doesn’t give them much money in return. (Most of their money in 2025 comes from cloud services, not operating systems)
Rumors (Yes, just rumors, I know) have it that MS is working on a shim to be able to just use the Linux kernel under the hood. That’s what spawned WSL. It is a side effect of the work to get the shim between the Win64 userland and Linux kernel. The shim will probably be a temporary thing, until all the ABIs are done.
Mostly because Microsoft tries to maintain backwards compatibility to ridiculous extents, and their customers grew accustomed to it so they kinda rely on it, no ?
I mean, they do until they don’t. They eventually retired 16 bit subsystem, and they are gungho on TPM now. They have always had EOL dates for old OS’s too. I’m not entirely sure why they do what they do, I suspect they are too large and unwieldy to operate as an entity with a unified vision.
Surely it’s less work to maintain security patches for a few prior versions of windows than it is to indefinitely maintain backwards compatibility
Sure, and for home users the backwards compatibility feature only really comes up for people into retro-gaming, but a significant portion of their customer base is government agencies that haven’t updated their software since the '90s. The old hardware is dying, so they need new stuff, and that means something with a new OS to run it, but it also needs to be able to run an ancient program that can only be replaced if some some seventy-something who calls every console a Nintendo can be made to understand why software older than their grandkids isn’t the best thing to have, and they might need to introduce and pass a bill to get it done, not to mention budgeting to commission a company to code the replacement.
maybe, but there are also things it arguably does better than Linux, e.g. user access control
(If you can still find this story, I’d be very interested in it, please do link to it here.)
Thank you arse assassin
I had forgotten about this!! I’ll have to start up a VM this morning to check it out.
For those who don’t have the spare time 🤭
yeah I know, far from production-ready though
That is the fun part 😏
Except for the part where decades’ worth of software no longer runs on Windows.
Right, because Linux definitely can’t run Windows software. Don’t check.
Hide WINE in the box
Boxed WINE? Disgusting
Try to run old soft on windows though😓
Seriously, Microsoft’s absurd level of commitment to backwards compatibility is the entire reason Windows has such staying power. I had to fuck around with things to get a Linux port of a ten year old game running without issues, and it was even the Steam version, but Windows will install and run most twenty year old games right off of the original CD without the user having to do anything at all.
That compatability has been dropping recently, especially for games. Most of my CD games need extra libraries to run now, if they work at all.
I hear this a lot but in production I still see xp/win 7 era PC’s all the time due to comparability issues (half the time still online too :/ )
Maybe its just absurd support for big spenders like the US military?
Seems like the small companies are mostly getting burned by gambling on MS
