Quick post, outlining what I think makes the Unix family of operating systems superior, including "unix-like" operating systems such as GNU/Linux, BSD, and others. Of course, the list isn't exhaustive- it's just something I threw together in 10 minutes. The motivation of the post was a discussion in ##unix on Freenode.
- The command line interface.
- Various shells, including their script syntax.
- Builtin programming language support for many languages.
- Common Unix utilities, such as grep, rsync, ssh, lsof, and others.
- All the supported filesystems (ZFS, Ext4, Reiser, UFS, etc.).
- Overall rock-solid stability and reliability.
- Lack of viruses, trojans, and other malware.
- Tremendous networking capabilities (PPoE, TCP/IP, etc.).
- Bulletproof firewall software.
- Overall builtin security in general (MACs, PAM, etc.).
- Quality user/group management.
- System resource usage.
- Both vertical and horizontal scaling.
- Portability.
- Plain text configuration files.
- Open source kernel and user-space software.
- Based on standards (POSIX, FHS, LSB, etc.).
- Vast selection of software choices (various text editors, MUAs, etc.)
- Simplicity in software design- do one thing, and do it well.
- Mind-blowing hardware support.
- Support for hundreds of languages and locales out of the box.
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