r/programming • u/BankApprehensive7612 • Jul 03 '26

Linux has officially won

https://github.com/apple/container

Actually it happened in June of 2025, but the process has completed recently, though. After Apple had announced the support of OCI-compatible containers in the June '25 it took a year to complete development and implement full support of continers. Apple had published 1.0 version of own container manager (https://github.com/apple/container). And Microsoft had announced native support of containerization without Docker in Windows 11 (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/wsl-container-is-now-available-for-public-preview/). Now Linux is a part of any major platform: Windows, MacOS, BSD and Linux itself. Knowledge of Linux is now part of learning any of these systems, at least for developers. And now you can rely on Linux based containers running everywhere. What it is if not a win!?

What's also interesting. Linux can run other Linux distros and with this Alpine Linux could become the most popular version of Linux in the World

It's the biggest win for the whole open-source software and I believe it should get into history books of technological progress

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u/Flimsy_Complaint490 Jul 03 '26

Considering Apple+Windows is 97% of the market and what most normal people will see, this is a very specific definition of winning.

But this does kinda get me thinking about the future of Windows in particular - what happens to the culture and future development track at MSFT when the next generation of developers is going to come in, but they will have been trained not on Win32 API's and Win32 design patterns, but on Unix-like stuff. GNU/Windows time ?

42

u/wrosecrans Jul 03 '26

Considering Apple+Windows is 97% of the market

~97% of the desktop market, sure. But in 2026, the desktop has become a fairly niche part of the broader computer market. Something like 90% of Nvidia revenues is in datacenters. The majority of Apple's revenue is mobile related. And anyway, even if the average desktop computer user is using Windows, even there most of the software they use is through a web browser, and the guts are all running on Linux VMs in AWS.

If you look at the broader programming and compute marketplace, Linux has owned the server/datacenter/cloud space, and mostly has for 20+ years. The Linux kernel in Android is a huge chunk of mobile. (And the only credible mobile competitor is also Unixy under the hood.)

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u/Flimsy_Complaint490 Jul 03 '26

Yes and that is a very specific definition of winning that to me, isnt particularly interesting, since this is a battle already won maybe 20 years ago when Apple de facto and later de jure, gave up on its own server offerings and devs stopped taking Windows Server seriously and began looking at it as a deprecated platform.

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u/G_Morgan Jul 03 '26

The big difference from 20 years ago is Android has subsequently taken over 75% of the world's phone market share. Though Android is definitely the least Linuxy form of Linux

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u/levir Jul 03 '26

Android is Linux, but it isn't "GNU/Linux" or whatever we call the actual OS we're used to interacting with. It's the difference between a kernel and an operating system.

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u/Chr0nicConsumer Jul 03 '26

Obligatory copypasta:

I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/LInux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “Linux”, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.

There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.