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by mrweasel 423 days ago
It might be because it's a teaching tool, but the introduction contains a lot of fundament misunderstandings and factual mistakes.

Take networking, one of the screenshots shows the output of ifconfig. That teaches you almost nothing about Linux networking, because ifconfig in Linux and OpenBSD are two very different tools, and you'd probably not teach people to use ifconfig on a modern Linux distro. Same for the boot process... rc and systemd are not the same, not even close.

It is a very cool project but almost all references to Linux is wrong.
1 comments
skrebbel 422 days ago
> almost all references to Linux

The word "Linux" only occurs on the page once.

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smcameron 422 days ago
Which is weird, because the stated purpose of MinC is: "MinC was written to help children at vocational education learn Linux without the hassle of virtualization." And it does this by running OpenBSD on Windows? That's really strange. Why not just run linux if the goal is to teach/learn linux? Perhaps the actual goal is not well stated, or I misinterpret what is really meant by those words.
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skrebbel 422 days ago
Sure, it's confusing. But the suggestion here is that this single word implies a "lot of fundament misunderstandings and factual mistakes" (sic), and therefore the many negative comments in this thread about that word are warranted, and frankly that's just ridiculous.

Notably, from a teaching "Unix tools 101" perspective, the difference is super unimportant. If the author's goal is to get students to open a terminal for the first time in their lives (on their Windows laptops!) and type some ls commands and maybe pipe stuff into sed once or twice, they can learn this on a BSD and apply it in any Linux (or the reverse) just fine.

I think the author means it literally. His goal is to teach students some Linux basics, and his method is to put a BSD into their Windows. It's kinda nuts, but you gotta agree it's kinda "mad genuis" nuts.

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thingfish 422 days ago
Ah! You got it. Are you a teacher? You should try it.
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skrebbel 422 days ago
Nop not at all. In fact I'm a Windows user who doesn't actually know how to pipe things into sed. :-)
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