There are a lot of hobby Unix-like OS’s however. I don’t see the point in most of them, but still.
You also forgot macOS. It’s a shitty “UNIX-certified” OS though.
Its a BSD derivat tho.
In a sense, NextStep is the only one of the old Unix vendors to still have a significant install base.
Where BeOS?
…beOS wasn’t really a POSIX system, but NeXTstep might fit alongside the others…
NeXTSTEP (and therefore, modern macOS) is a BSD.
I liked OpenSolaris, you could order a free CD from their website and they’d post it, even internationally.
I still have one of those! 😆
Didn’t use it too much, tho. Never installed it on bare metal, only in a VM, and back in those days I was in my distro-hopping phase (I was discovering Arch), so I tested it and quickly forgot about it.
We ran OpenSolaris as our NFS server for several years on ASUS Xeon servers. zfs was a big part of that. Ilumos is still alive and keeping the OpenSolaris world going in a small way.
Thanks for digging it up and sharing the photo! It’s nostalgic seeing this
I barely got an opportunity to try out Solaris/opensolaris (honestly I don’t remember which) before Oracle got involved. It gave me the impression of being a no nonsense, get shit done workstation OS. It was clean, it had enough frill that anyone could sit down in front of it and start working, but it wasn’t showy. I wasn’t a business person doing business things, and I was really just looking around for a good office suite on a stable OS that I could make it through college with. I really liked the “this is where work gets done” feel of it.
Ubuntu did that too for a while. I had a kubuntu cd.
they sent us a big box of CDs to the CS department an uni. ran it as a daily driver for a semester.
Redox OS is a little baby sprout of grass on the very right
I don’t think that’s a good fit there, Redox OS is 10 years old and has yet to go stable. In the same timespan in the 90s, Linux managed to carve out a notable portion of server market share. I am not going to Tanenbaum myself and claim it’s never going to go anywhere but as is, Redox is more like the one who didn’t show up because they are still in their moms basement.
Just wait for Hurd!
Hurd will kick all those little asses, you’ll see, whenever it comes out!
And then GNU will be really independent and superior!
Can just be like a few years now!Edit: I shouldn’t type anymore today …
Actually Solaris is still squirming while the first shovels of dirt are being heaped on.
No love for temple os 😢
OP rewrite this meme…right now! TempleOS or ban.
Temple OS wasn’t Unix-like.
Also it gets way too much attention as is IMO. Its the only hobby OS project people know about, purely because 4chan turned its mentally ill creator into a meme.
What other hobby operating systems have a cool hook like TempleOS’s religious thing?
I didn’t realize the pattern
SerenityOS has some relevance and its new.
While much of the Unix family has died, (especially in the System V family) there is an old one surviving and a few new additions being added.
Solaris is still alive, and from it was forked illumos. Meanwhile BSD has spawned its own family made up of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonFlyBSD, but also MacOS and Playstation. Other systems that appeared without any prior history like Linux include Redox OS and SerenityOS.
With that being said, the Unix family has noticeably shrunk, and the System V family is very much in danger of going extinct, with only the Solaris branch looking like it will survive the next year. If the System V family goes extinct, it would make the BSD family the only surviving branch descended from the original Unix.
I watch a lot of videos to this day from Bryan Cantrill (Oxide computer) and he’s got some wild stories about the forking of illumos and how difficult it was to essentially “save” Solaris. His company uses their own illumos based distro called heliOS on their oxide computer rack.
Oh, and Minix still exists.
If you have an Intel based system with AMT, you’re running minix on a 486 and probably don’t know it.
Qnx Unix still technically kicking
Quite popular in automotive and other embedded applications. License and support costs were driving the last company I worked for to explore Linux as an alternative though.
Qnx is certified and has (hard) rtos baked in.
But montavista and others give most of that by now for less and are more maintainable anyway.
SCO crashed and burned in part because they tried to sue multiple Linux providers claiming that they owned all the rights to certain pieces of code that they’d contractually leased from IBM, and that IBM giving code to Linux distributors violated the terms of their agreement with IBM. It was a lawsuit that dragged on for over a decade and a half–I think that it’s still going–and it’s bled SCO of tens of millions of dollars ,esp. since they’ve lost nearly every single claim they’ve made.
SCO Unix was mostly dead before then (not fully dead, just smelled like it). They were never the most popular Unix vendor to begin with. Caldera–a commercial Linux distro–had bought them out, and that’s when the legal trouble started.
All those old vendors tended to have one specific thing they were really good at. IIRC, the thing for SCO was that they could load up hundreds of users on a single box on 1990s hardware. No small feat when the traditional Unix model needs to
fork()a process for login/shell/whatever.It’s been a long time since I worked on that case, and I only did a very small part working on the discovery documents, so I’ve forgotten a lot, and had a lot of details a little confused. :)
It sounds like it was probably one of the seminal patent troll cases.
Copyright, yes. And a lot of this is corporate history rather than the legal portion.
SCO always reminds me of this:
They tried to use the DMCA for header files in the source. https://linux.slashdot.org/story/03/12/22/1815224/sco-invokes-dmca-names-headers-novell-steps-in
Msft funded them for a while to do this:
Good, almost all of them were horrible, like AIX.
AIX is still alive and kicking if anyone still wants that “Linux but on hard mode” experience.
Irix is missing. It was quite cool at the time. (Well, its desktop was).
Eventually will be just BSD
Bless your heart.
Amen, freebsd crew represent!
And to anybody throwing shade:
BSD is literally the #1 mobile os, and has been for years, even if the kernel has extra chromosomes.
even if the kernel has extra chromosomes.
Okay, that is a hilarious way of saying those forks are back of the short bus “ssssspecial”.
2025: Linux
2026: GNU/Hurd
2030: Plan9
but why was mematic used if GIMP was used?
Why are there only five headstones and two characters in the second panel when there are eight operating systems in the first panel?
The ghost doesn’t get a gravestone
Sun.
GNU Hurd is technically alive, just horribly obsolete.
SCO Unix still exists i guess
Probably the format had the watermark already baked in
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
