From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
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.
Isnt zsh the default macos shell?
It has been since 2019 but before that it was bash.
They switched to bash in 2003 with Mac OS X 10.3; before that it was tcsh.
It is now, but it was bash before.
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.
Unix, Linux, whats the diff? Its all the same.
~This~ ~comment~ ~is~ ~licensed~ ~under~ ~CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0~
I love the idea of licensing comments XD
You're probably the only one, but thank you for saying that. 🙂
Does the lack of licensing in this comment mean it's okay to steal?
Nope, the opposite: in the absence of an explicit license, the default is "all rights reserved."
You are not new to lemmy, it says you registered a year ago, but is this the first time you meet a comment with license info? You are one of today's lucky 10000.
I've seen this on multiple users, usually it's some anti ai license. Like the laws stopped facebook from torrenting copyrighted books, an anti ai license will stop the next ai startup scraping the fediverse.
I mean it's kind of like the "humans evolved from monkeys" or whatever primate you want to substitute for monkey. No, they branched off from a common ancestor though.
I mean lots of people get mixed up between BSD, Linux, UNIX, and all the variations over the years. Is MacOS a version of Linux? No. Is a human a type of ape? No. Are MacOS and Linux way, way closer than either are to Windows, hell yes. Just like people are way closer to being monkeys than swallows. There's a lot of mixed breeding in both examples and a lot of total incompatibilities as well.
Is a human a type of ape? No.
12% of humans believe we aren’t apes
Edit: hopeful the number is actually this low
12% of humans believe we aren’t apes
All humans are apes, those people more so than most.
Pft, everyone knows macOS is just a fancy DE on top of Hannah Montana Linux
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
Most people think UNIX and Linux are the same thing so this makes sense. Obviously to us they aren’t but for most people it really doesn’t matter. I’m sure they’ll still sleep at night.
I get that it specifies tech workers, but still my first reaction was that 12% is pretty low. You can find a much higher percentage of people who are confidently wrong about way more important things.
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.
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 😆)
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