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by bch 2440 days ago
50 years ago, Unix came from the future and showed us that less is more, and a good collection of composable tools can take you an awful long way. Along the way it’s evolved, demonstrating its flexibility and also suffered campaigns[0][1] by juggernauts like Microsoft demonstrating its durability. It (Linux - Potayto potahto.) runs every single super computer in the TOPS[2] ranking (500 entries) and has for the last 4 years.

I don’t actually know what iOS is, architecturally, but we know Android is also Unix (Linux), so it’s everywhere, serving us pretty well.

What’s not to like? What would you suggest instead?

[0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_...

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/scalability-day-falls-short/

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500

3 comments

Android is Java based frameworks + ISO C and ISO C++ standard libraries.

The fact that is has Linux under the covers is pretty much insignificant and completely transparent to userspace.

iOS is a different OS but using the same Darwin core operating system, including XNU, the C library (+ a bunch of other ones) and launchd.

Unix command-line tools aren't present except the bare minimum for crash dump purposes on release iOS. The full set of BSD tools is present on internal builds and they're installed while jailbreaking.

iOS is Apple's mobile OS. Basically a Unix derivate. ;)
This is like Steve Jobs announcing that iPhone runs OS X in the very first iPhone keynote.
Which is true