SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
With another of his graphs derived from StatCounter data, blogger and Linux advocate Robert Pogson reports
It was only a few years ago that the sycophants of M$ were trumpeting that */Linux was struggling to reach ~1% share of the desktop anywhere. Many of those were in USA.
Well, the chickens have come home to roost in The Year Of The Linux Desktop. */Linux has ~5% share. Are we there yet? Nope. FLOSS is still going places and growing stronger every year. Classical GNU/Linux grew rapidly until mid-year when Android/Unknown and Chrome OS took up slack. It's all good.
I would have said "He who laughs last laughs best" but, hey, it's his blog.
...and remembering how Chromebooks dominated the sales figures last Christmas, I can't wait to see how the SteamBox sales go this Christmas.
Previous: Given the Choice for Christmas 2014, Consumers Chose Linux
Big Jump in Bahrain: Linux Now At 16 Percent
(Score: 0, Troll) by Runaway1956 on Monday October 19 2015, @06:44PM
DOS was an "operating system" - the "disk operating system" to be precise.
Windows is an "operating system".
Unix is an "operating system".
Linux is an "operating system".
Gnu is a collection of userland applications.
If RMS ever produces a working kernel, then he can distribute his own operating system. Until then, he merely distributes some applications.
The eccentric old bastard can't define what an operating system is, nor can he arbitrarily rename an operating system just because people in userland prefer his applications.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 19 2015, @07:19PM
Linux is an "operating system".
Linux is a kernel.
(Score: 1, Troll) by fnj on Monday October 19 2015, @09:43PM
Bullshit. You have no idea what "operating system" means [wikipedia.org]: "An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources and provides common services for computer programs."
GNU is a collection of computer programs.
"Informative", my ass, retard mod.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday October 19 2015, @10:46PM
glibc definitely provides common services for computer programs.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday October 20 2015, @09:08AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by NickFortune on Tuesday October 20 2015, @10:30AM
I think you'll find the term is overloaded and used to refer to both the Kernel and the O/S distributions commonly built around that kernel.
(Score: 5, Informative) by vux984 on Monday October 19 2015, @07:37PM
DOS was an "operating system" - the "disk operating system" to be precise.
Sure. DOS is an operating system. And if DOS were "GNU/Linux" then the DOS part would be the hidden: io.sys and msdos.sys, and perhaps emm386.sys and himem.sys and that's about it. The GNU part would be most of what's in command.com (cd, mkdir, rd, set, path, the batch file processor) and all of the utilities (xcopy, deltree, edlin/edit...ie pretty much everything in the C:\DOS folder). You consider those a pretty integral part of the DOS operating system do you not? I know I do.
Windows is even more ridiculous, if you wrapped a different user-land around the Windows Kernel, it wouldn't be "Windows".
"Linux" the kernel project doesn't include any of that. GNU/Linux, like or not, really is the operating system. Its not like GNU is just emacs and . GNU is bash, grep, ls, cd, ps, man, chown, chmod, mkdir, tail. Not to mention the C standard libary, and GCC etc. You can't use Linux without GNU ... unless you replaced all the GNU stuff. Its not 'optional'. Maybe you've conflated GNU with GNOME or something? Because GNU/Linux without GNOME is still an operating system. But Linux without GNU... is not.
I tend to call it linux myself because I'm lazy (aka normal), but I at least recognize that RMS is right. And I certainly don't get worked about about seeing it written in full GNU/Linux in an article on the internet.
"Unix is an "operating system".
Unix is more accurately a family of operating systems that share certain characteristics. I guess the same is true of Windows to a lesser degree, and even DOS is a family (DOS 3.0 vs DOS 6.22 etc) but Unix is even less specific.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by fnj on Monday October 19 2015, @09:48PM
You don't know shit. Command.com is part of DOS, just like sh is part of BSD. The utilities you mention are just what you called them - utilities. They are programs that run under an OPERATING SYSTEM.
Iidiot mods.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 19 2015, @10:33PM
Are you that young that you have never heard of 4DOS or NDOS (drop-in replacements for MICROS~1's command interpreter)?
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Monday October 19 2015, @11:32PM
Yes, I know what those are, and even recall that you invoke them with SHELL=xxxxx in config.sys.
But I fail to see your point? I can replace any arbitrary file in a linux install too with one of my own creation.
Does that mean the original file wasn't part of the operating system?
If that's your argument, well... no... that would be too stupid to be your argument... so what is your argument exactly?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday October 19 2015, @10:50PM
If command.com and sh are part of the OS, then bash is, too, because it fulfils the role of sh on Linux. And bash is GNU.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Monday October 19 2015, @11:26PM
Command.com is part of DOS
just like sh is part of BSD
Yes. And carrying on then... bash is part of Linux?
But we get bash from GNU. So where are you going with this?
The utilities you mention are just what you called them - utilities. They are programs that run under an OPERATING SYSTEM.
The C standard library (itself used by the (sic) "OPERATING SYSTEM") is maintained by GNU. That's not a utility, nor a program.
And those basic utilities... from attrib to xcopy -- yes they are part of the operating system. They aren't part of the 'kernel'. But they ARE absolutely part of the operating *SYSTEM*.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 19 2015, @10:30PM
That name which must not be spoken??
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 19 2015, @07:38PM
So what is android then?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 20 2015, @01:09PM
A mess.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday October 20 2015, @04:31AM
Gnu is a collection of userland applications.
That's not strictly true [wikipedia.org].
Say what you want, but all the GNU stuff taken together *does* make an operating system.
And while I'm not a huge fan of RMS, I am a huge fan of looking at things in an unbiased way.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr