My parents know one and it's windows. One time my dad messaged me at work to ask if his laptop had windows xp, vista, 7, 8, 10 or 11, so he doesn't even know the version differences :p

My mom may also say "samsung" as an operating system if you prod enough, but she also knows their laptop has windows 11, so she knows more than my dad

So that's what the average non-tech person thinks about OSes

What about Solaris? Irix? OS/2? BeOS? Certainly people have at least a passing awareness of the most popular OSes. I mean, I wouldn't expect VMS to be on their list, but...

What about Solaris?

Never happened. Didn't exist. Nope.

The fuck is BSD?

sincerely: a non-technical mint user

Yeah. A typical non-tech person is just as likely to say their PC is running on Microsoft or Google. Maybe they'll say Edge if they are really knowledgeable.

One of the two is bound to be Hannah Montana linux

Basically Macos

B (Berkeley), S (Software), D (Distribution).

A Unix based OS, developed at Berkeley.

I jokingly threatened to install Hannah Montanna Linux on my wife's windows gaming rig, and she said she wouldn't be mad.

If only that version wasn't deprecated.

What the fuck did you just fucking say to me, you little bitch? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class at Berkeley, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on GNU, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in al-gore-rhythm warfare and I'm the top sniper in the entire FOSS ecosystem. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You're fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that's just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You're fucking dead, kiddo

I believe it was recently revived.

Cool, thanks for the straight answer.

I've literally had to explain the existence of other operating systems than Windows to people. They had never heard of Linux.

Technically yes, but there's a lot more to it lol

It's a bit like if you separated two twins and raised them in isolation to study nature vs nurture

Am in tech. Surrounded by tech people. Front devs, back devs, data engineers, data scientists and analysts, IT techs...

They know windows. They know macOS as an "easier alternative for normies". Some of them even prefer it because it's "easy". A few of them even know there's a terminal somewhere, but wouldn't git commit from the command line even if their life depended on it.

A lot of them have heard of Linux, in a distant and nebulous way. Most of them still believe that Linux is confined to the server space or a weird dev environment inside WSL because you're developing for servers, that you can't daily drive Linux as a desktop, or that you can't game on Linux. None of them would consider switching even if they spend their day complaining about how shitty windows is.

This is true for about 95% of the tech people I interact with btw. Big tech psyop is real.

As a former FreeBSD user I feel this often.

When I started working for a MSP 15 years ago, the world of corporations introduced me to AS/400 (or iSeries, or IBM i). It's not that obscure as big corporations are still using it, but I never heard of it before starting working for big businesses.

A separate family of operating systems. It's a direct decendant of the old UNIX. FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD are the most common distributions.

It shares a lot of the same userspace tools as Linux (the GNUserspace, if you will), so if you're used to the command line, a lot will seem familiar at a first glance. However, the underlying mechanisms can feel a bit strange at first once you try it out.

I used FreeBSD as my daily driver back in the day, but now I'm also on Mint, mostly because I used linux more at work.

I've been meaning to check out BSD these days to see how far it's come since I last used it 20ish years ago, I just haven't gotten around to it.

I also remember hearing someone say that there are two things from Berkley that messes with your head: BSD and LSD.

Oh shit, hell yeah

Most of them are unaware of what an OS is even.

Have you ever heard something like saying "His Windows is Linux"?

An upgrade to having never heard of Linux but also a downgrade somehow

It's weird to think about it and notice that's basically true.

MacOS is closed-sourced Darwin, which is itself a descendant of BSD.

Omg, license laundering goes brrr.

A long time ago (I cannot find it anymore, may have been deleted) I read a "tale from tech support" where a user called tech support and complained "my operating system is missing". Retelling from memory:

Tech support person tried to walk the user through various steps until the user said "ok, let me just close these documents…"

"Wait, you have open documents? Your operating system is not missing."

"What? No, it is."

"If your operating system were missing, you wouldn't be able to do anything with your computer, you wouldn't have open documents. If you can do that, you definitely have some operating system. What version of Windows is the computer running?"

"Windows 7."

"There you have it, that's your operating system."

"That's Windows, not operating system."

And Haiku? And ReactOS? And GreenteaOS? And Minix? And GNU Hurd? And ELKS? And Ironclad? And HyperBK? And ToaruOS? And Redox OS?

I would be surprised if the average person knows even one operating system, including the ones they use

I constantly remind myself of the George Carlin(I think) quote:

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize that half of them are stupider than that.”

Also important to remember Douglas Adams (when underestimating stupid people):

“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”

Have gotten to post that one twice this week!

In a strictly semantic way it is technically true; It is the basic building block of what later became the building block of macos.

Responded to the wrong person.

What I meant to write here was: I've used both linux and freebsd, and nature vs nature holds true, I th8nk. But I am unsure which one is which.

I wouldn't take a developer who can't write git commit from command line seriously

In a strictly semantic way it is technically true; It is the basic building block of what later became the basic building block of macos

i am pretty sure quite few people would not notice at all if you changed their windows for kde, as long as the same icons were on the same place on desktop.

One of my developer interns only ever uses the visual Git plugin in IntelliJ. It seems to work for him, but I can't figure it out at all for the life of me; something about the visuals made it so difficult for me to parse. I'll stick to my terminal, thanks.

That is true, don't even need to change icons.

Years ago when I lived with my parents I had my mother's desktop setup with a dual boot testing things in KDE 3. Went to get a snack and came back to my mother sitting there playing kmahjongg.

She spent two hours playing kmahjongg and kpatience before she yelled wanting to know where her microsoft picture-it was.
Never even noticed she wasn't in Windows.

I know this happens often but I still struggle to accept that it's possible

Well I sure used to like LSD, but I get the feeling that I'm not qualified for Berkeley's other offering.

Right?

I could believe maybe only half know what VxWorks is, but otherwise....

So, there are a couple of things. Here is where I push up my glasses and say "well--ahem--"

First, true, BSD is not itself Unix. That specific OS (which began with the PDP-7 Operating System in the late 1960s) really only existed until the late 80s or early 90s, when Bell Labs stopped working on it.

However, it is literally Unix-based. The first version of BSD was forked (as we'd call it today) from the Research Unix source code at UC Berkeley. Since then, the various BSD derivatives and distros have all iterated upon or forked from that initial Unix code. I don't think any are officially registered as SUS systems (but there are only a handful that are), which means that a pedant would say that BSD is technically "Unix-like."

But it is based on Unix, it's a part of the Unix family, just like Windows 11 is part of the NT family. MacOS is also part of the Unix family (I think it might be or used to have been SUS-registered, actually). Linux isn't, and I think I remember hearing that Torvalds didn't even use the Research Unix source code to write the Linux kernel originally, but it does follow a lot of the SUS spec and so is definitely Unix-like.

"MACOS" ? ... a typo of "MACROS" ?
Edit : Nevermind... "MacOS"

And like a half lf these also knows about Xen

Oh, that's a good one.
I'm very far from being tech savvy myself, so I gradually tried to remind myself people can not care enough about this stuff to learn even some basic terminology or have other, more urgent concerns. A lot of the service industry depends on this kind of unfamiliarity, I guess.

I didn't mean that either results specifically from nature or nurture, but that there's a lot of nuance between the two that makes me think of that kind of "forbidden experiment".

It's the same fabric as any human culture, I suppose, which is endlessly fascinating.

If you put Linux Mint on the average persons PC and set it up with the same desktop icons as their windows pc they wouldn't know it wasn't windows.

Torvalds was inspired by Minix (which was in turn inspired by UNIX) but didn't follow Tannenbaum's micro-kernel model.

Exactly what a SunOS user would say.

Yep, my first level tech support experience absolutely confirms this. The question what operating system the client uses has gotten me a wide variety of answers, and most of them did not have anything to do with operating systems.

the GNUserspace, if you will

You know I won't.

The average person has tried four or five different operating systems.

Just show them where the web browser is and done!

We got a historian over here! Lol
Twins is a bit strong as a descriptor but the spirit of it might be apt enough.

I wish I had learned more about BSD before getting so ingrained in Linux. Not because one is "better" or anything. They're just two different worlds. I'm not sure I have the bandwidth to explore it the way I'd like to, like I did with Linux.

But who knows, it's just one step more than all the distro and setup hopping I've done over the years.

But do they even know they have tried them?

I was definitely being silly. The average person doesn't even know operating systems exist.