You're setting quite a high bar for innovation if anything that "looks like unix" is not deemed to be innovative.

There's plenty of innovation in every modern "unixlike" OS. IllumOS, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, to take some common examples, have each taken different paths in different functional areas, and rarely is one objectively worse than any other unless you have the constraint of a particular set of hardware to run the kernel on and/or software to run under the kernel.

Filesystems, for instance. ZFS and Btrfs (to a lesser extent, mainly because it's years from being feature complete) are innovative compared to earlier mainstream filesystems. Yet, a typical desktop user would not notice any innovation. Typical users are not concerned with snapshots, sending snapshot diffs between devices, or scrubbing a raid array for errors. ZFS has been criticized for being a resource hog, and both have been criticized for being slow. There are always trade offs. Getting a modern filesystem with COW and block checksums or hashes has performance costs, particularly on rotating disks. The only thing a desktop user will notice about a 5 year old computer running linux or BSD with a ZFS or btrfs filesystem is that it's slow. Slowness isn't innovative, right?

ZFS - Linus had nothing to do with that! That was Sun.

Of course there's kernel innovation, my point was that this is true for all variants - not just Linux which gets all the attention.

>there's really nothing very innovating about Linux

>Of course there's kernel innovation

:\

Perhaps ease up a bit on the hyperbole, you just took 2 polar opposite positions in the space of as many comments.

>ZFS - Linus had nothing to do with that

harshreality wasn't saying that Linus had anything to do with ZFS, he was noting it as an example of 'innovation [in something] that "looks like unix"' in order to counter your odd implication that that all unix variants are pretty much the same and devoid of innovation. To break down your argument, you say that: 1 - "Linux isn't innovative" 2 - "It's just another variant" 3 - "Like the myriad of other ones"

So Linux isn't innovative, and since all of the other ones (Solaris, BSDs, etc.) are alike, that they are neither innovative. You basically denied that there has been any innovation in Unix since it left Bell Labs. The ZFS example was a counter to that implicit claim.

As far as UNIX variants go, don’t Apple’s OS X and iOS get way more attention than all the Linux distributions combined?

>While I like linux, and I am writing this on an Ubuntu 13.10 install, there's really nothing very innovating about Linux, for anyone that has a unix history, it's just another variant, like the myriad of other ones [1].

I really wish I could use control-F on paper books.

I don't remember what book it was in, I think maybe the Art of Unix Programming or Just for Fun, but somebody remarked that the real innovation of Linux was the modern open source model of software development. And I think that's mostly true.

Your second paragraph is off topic and obviously wrong. I will not go into why it is wrong because it is off topic, but I cannot let patently false throw away statements stay unchallenged. Some poor soul may actually believe you.

Regarding your first paragraph, you cannot make a tribute inadvertently. The definition of the word tribute requires a certain intention. In layman's terms, if Linus did not intend something to be a tribute, then it is not a tribute.

So, you're saying... absolutely nothing, just being Linux fanboy. That's fine.

So, it seems like you're agreeing with me, that Linus was making a tribute to windows? It's unclear what you're trying to say really.

Ummm.... isnt 13.10 built with Mir - the new display server ? That in itself was huge.

Huge? Seriously? It's just a more efficient window manager. I don't really care much about the window manage, X has never been inefficient for me, my hardware is plenty fast enough. I think Mir is more likely a benefit for low end hardware like smartphones.

Window Manager used to have a very specific meaning, at least for me... WindowMaker, Sawfish, BlackBox, E16, E17, FVWM, TWM, these are all window managers. X11 is not a window manager. All window managers run under X11. These are the precepts.

Windows had a window manager too, and you could swap it out. There weren't nearly as many options.

Anyway, I for one am excited about Mir, because it means that my tf-101 or the replacement some years in the future may rejoin the convergence zone. They are making steps to live in the Android ecosystem, at least according to the article summaries I've come across that give any inkling of information about Mir.

If you google ASUS Transformer Ubuntu and follow some of the howtos you find, it's an absolute joke trying to get a windowed environment that resembles any netbook, laptop, or desktop you could buy last year or the year before that. "Now use Android VNC client to connect..." WTF?

Nobody else seems to be heading back to the convergence zone. Maybe wayland will get there at the same time. That's my rant.

To me hnriot sounds like a Manager. :) Devil is in the details and managers hate those.

Not that the definition of Window Manager is at all germane to the point, which I think was "I don't like efficiency".

Could have been either that, or "competition is bad, we already have the best way." You're right I think, it is probably characteristic of a manager to try to tell people what way to spend their time.

I don't think it lacks any sarcasm. Think about it. "For Workgroups". Wasn't that the new thing for Windows? Windows never was build with networking in mind. Heck, it wasn't even build with a multi user setup in mind.

All that came tacked on later and thus had inherent security issues because of backward compatibility.

So, calling Linux (which was always build around both, multi user and networking) "For Workgroups" in this 3.11 iteration is 100% sarcastic. Seeing as they (Linux) wouldn't even have to add that "For Workgroups" as it goes without saying that Linux is capable of it.

Linux was never intended to be truly innovative. It was intended to be a free/open unix. There was a strong demand for an open source unix that could be expanded upon, and there was none, until Linus released linux.

There was minix, which was a lot more innovative (microkernel), but Tanenbaum wanted to keep it strictly for educational purposes, simple and easy, and didn't want to turn it into a big system with all the bells and whistles that linux got.

Had FreeBSD been released earlier, that might have had the position that linux has now.

Right, like how there's nothing innovative in automobiles now; they're all still on four wheels and controlled with a steering wheel and pedals. I mean, come on!

Well...to be fair there really isn't. Perhaps in some new high tech Japanese supercars but the average car rolling off the assembly line in Detroit is about as innovative as a ham sandwich. Many cars still have incandescent light bulbs in them and the latest in-car tech is less innovative than 90% of the tech you find at a Toys-r-us store.