Voice of the Masses: Has Linux won the Unix wars?
Back when the GNU project began in the mid 1980s, and the Linux kernel in 1991, there was plenty of competition amongst commercial Unix vendors. SunOS, AIX, IRIX, HP-UX, Trux64, Ultrix, Xenix… The list went on. Over the years, however, many have ceased to exist or have gone into long-term “maintenance” modes. Now there are rumours that Solaris could also suffer the same fate, which poses the question: has Linux won the Unix wars?
We’re not just asking if Linux has become more popular than all other Unix-like operating systems – that’s a fact. But has Linux come out on top because of technical superiority, its FOSSyness, or somthing else? Or have most of the other Unix variants faded away due to unrelated factors? We’ll be recording our next podcast early next week, so let us know your musings in the comments below and we’ll read out the best. Oh, and extra points for digging out info on especially obscure Unix-like OSes too…
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About The Author
Mike Saunders
Mike stores his data by printing out hex dumps and laminating the sheets. He's the author of The Haynes Linux Manual and the creator of MikeOS, an operating system hand-built from assembly language.
I’d say yes, Linux wiped out most competition from other Unix systems. Linux owns the small & medium scale server spaces. AFAIK, proprietary Unix still dominates on the extremely-high-end supercomputer scale (although they can all also run Linux, they just mostly don’t). At least numerically though, Mac has won the Unix desktop wars. Although there’s probably a degree of debate about how much of a Unix it is, the concept of a “real” Unix is pretty much meaningless at this point, with systemd, Linux binaries on windows, etc. Anecdotally it seems that Linux has eaten a lot of the FOSS Unix space from *BSDs also, although “BSD is dying” was a meme on Slashdot since the days of yore, I’m not sure if its ongoing death has got worse or better.
Linux beat the other Unixes by being free as in beer and speech, both were very important, the beer perhaps more important. The “viral” GPL is a huge factor in the kernel’s success. And the fragmentation of the developer and user base of the BSDs had an impact. As Linux became more adopted by business, companies were looking to standardize, and removing platform variation between Linux and the *BSDs was one way that they could do this, so BSD got left behind as things failed to be ported to it.
This is a great reply – I’ve learnt a lot from this thread.
My interpretation:
unix desktop – crown goes to MacOSX
unix server – yes, linux has won
Surely Apple has won.
Surely Apple HAD won at one point, but we appear to be moving past it. Yes, the most dominant Unix-descended OS for mobile has been Android for a while, but that’s not news. The subtler shift has been the rise of ChromeOS/Chromium on desk/laptops while Apple’s share barely budges. If Chromebooks/boxes/bases haven’t overtaken Apple desktops already, they soon will, as they already have in the education sector.
So back to the central question – given that Android and ChromeOS are Linux (Fuchsia pre-echoes notwithstanding) , yes, Linux won the Unix wars. Apple’s Darwin gets an honorable mention for demonstrating the suitability of Unix for the general use community, but their position as a Unix leader is surely waning.
Linux has won because of its ease of installation, large variety of available desktops, large spectrum of supported hardware and to a certain extend because of the engagement of Linus Torvalds and his posse.
I don’t know that Linux has necessarily won. At least not completely. BSD seems to rule in certain niches. Many people in the know seem to think it’s technically superior to Linux, it’s available for many more platforms, and the license is more free – i.e it’s more friendly to commercial/proprietary usage. It’s important to note that a lot of the “critical infrastructure” things like OpenSSH are BSD projects. For these reasons I don’t think BSD is going away any time soon. And I think this diversity is mostly a good thing. But BSD is definitely the underdog. Assuming that Linux has “won”, I think it has won partially due to being more user-friendly than BSD, but also due to inertia, similar to the qwerty/dvorak thing. This was helped a lot by the legal troubles the BSDs had for a while there, right at a critical moment which allowed Linux to grow. By the time the suit was settled Linux had gained a critical foothold.
Between BSD and Linux, commercial unix is deader than disco and in that sense the unix wars are loooong over IMO – why would you pay for a proprietary version when you can get a superior (in the sense that it’s open source) version for free? To sum up my feelings, I don’t think Linux has won the unix wars, I think open source (not free software!) has.
Re the comment above about most supercomputers running proprietary unix, that’s not true these days. These days supercomputers overwhelmingly run Linux.
A non-technical person leaned over my shoulder, saw the Perl manual in a TTY and said “oh, Linux”. It’s won.
Was there a Unix war? Well Unix certainly won!
I pretty much agree with previous comments and in particular about the user friendliness of Linux.
On the other hand, I am skeptical about the technical superiority of the kernel, Linus is a terrific programmer, but I don’t think so about the rest of the kernel developers… and I’m quite sure about the rubbishness of the gnu software—eg. coreutils, texinfo, grub, and the like. Just google for the different `ls`, `cat` implementations out there and you will see the total lack of understanding of the Unix philosophy that the gnu people have.
I tend to the think of Linux as the Windows of the Unix world.
Nah, our code isn’t so bad. It’s pretty much the same everywhere. Go take a peek into FreeBSD’s codebase, a lot of it is strikingly similar in style to the Linux kernel.
You hit the nail on the head with those GNU jokers though.
The coreutils have strict standards and their their code have often outstanding performance, like bc. Less code doesn’t mean it’s a better program.
Ultrix is a cool name.
Maybe Linux won because Intel, Red Hat and IBM give it great technical (sometimes legal) support. Also the HP-UX, AIX, Solaris may great in some situations, but the cloud is certainly a Linux area with OpenStack and with several containers.
https://www.cnet.com/news/ibm-linux-is-the-logical-successor/
Yes Linux has won, but I think the primary reason has been the FLOSS nature. Linux has won through shear weight of numbers, which has propelled it to be better, more reliable, better featured than the others.
All the tools are built for Linux and then sometimes ported over top the other platforms.
It has had the numbers because of the FLOSS nature.
Surely Linux wins – Android variants can’t be fully ignored in this comparison/contest, though I don’t know if the Android OS can even be considered a variant anymore, it was initially. It has millions of users and arguably one of the most user-friendly GUIs ever.
GNU Linux is still dramatically on rise due to the impressive library of hardware support and the ease of installation with modern packages like Ubuntu and its more conservatively dressed offspring, Mint.
We have literally been pulling hardware from the trash heap that other OSes smothered with bloat, and out-perform them with current GNU Linuxes, just wow!
I believe that Linux got a really good push by a large number of ex-Amiga users initially. With the fall of Commodore and Amiga users all over the world jumping ship for PC Compatibles, lots of their previous habits (Using a bulletproof OS, extensive use of Libraries, Shell, and all the wonderful things of the Amiga OS) found common ground on Linux, and embraced it as they had done with the Amiga. Putting into the context the long lived rivalry over anything owned by Microsoft, I think that was the boost factor that drove many of us to seek an alternative to our past-time 16bit machine. And that was found on Slackware and Debian back in the day, and it has been going strong ever since.
This is just my personal thought, but for a similar reason FOSS was embraced with even more warmth due to a bad “habit”, again from the Amiga days. That was nothing else but pirated software. Amiga users being on the piracy bandwagon for years, used to own most of the software they ever had just by itself being copied from disk to disk. All of a sudden FOSS seemed like heaven on earth, by adopting the same principles of using and copying and sharing, but this time by being completely legal in doing so. I think that was a huge welcoming note to all users coming fresh from the Amiga to a new open source world, and helped the widespread use of Linux even more.
Linux is the kernel. And all the distributions wrapped around it combined have won but as an old Unix admin (Solaris, AiX) and now Redhat admin (out of necessity) I must add that I’ve lost all the passion I used to feel for the movement at the beginning of the 90’s. Hate the influx of Windows developers demanding X, hate all the web-based tools that have given me RSI… And frankly, it’s an eternal beta project, it can win in the market but does it merrit it? No.