Bitcoin Forum

I'm thinking of developing software for bitcoin users, and it would be useful to know what OSes the community uses. This should also be useful to other software developers.

Thanks to everyone who answered! I must say, I'm pretty impressed by the number of linux users! Go Bitcoin community!

Considering satoshi himself used windows its funny that linux has overtaken it.



Who else is Bi-OS ?

 :D

I'm hexa-OS, but 5 of them are in boxes: http://www.virtualbox.org/ (http://www.virtualbox.org/).

Screw rebooting.

My dayjob uses Windows, so I have it boot on my home desktop.
My netbook uses Linux.
And I prefer to develop on the Mac (Ruby/Rails).

Can virutalbox map to ATI gpus?

No.  VMWare Player (free as in beer) has ok 3D graphics support, but you're probably not going to get OpenCL.

IOS. I believe IPhone app would be very appreciated.

Yeah, a good iPhone app would bring down the barrier to entry a bit, I imagine.

Please change the "Linux" entry into "GNU/Linux".

I almost only use Linux nowadays.

But even as I love to see Linux dominate the poll, I can't help but thinking that it says a lot about how representative this community is of the computer using world.

Technolibertarian ubermensch.

Why single out GNU? There are a lot of other components of the system that are equally necessary to make it useful. The GNU stuff isn't such a critical thing anymore. We might as well call the system Firefox/KDE/Xorg/Linux or something.

But not just "linux" either.  Same as we don't call Mac OS X "Darwin".  Linux is just a kernel.

You can run a system without Firefox, KDE or Xorg.  But on most systems at least a few GNU apps (at minima a shell) is required around linux.


GNU is the acronym for "Gnu is Not Unix".  This means that GNU is designed to provide an OS comparable to Unix, without being exactly Unix.  Therefore its name should appear in the OS name, imo.

Firefox or Xorg are not designed to be an operating system.  They are just applications.

I think you've undermined your own argument there. All the GNU programs included in Linux are "just applications" too, and all of them can be replaced. (On embedded systems, they usually are, for instance.)

Well, maybe the boundary between an application and a part of an operating system is not clear, but at least the GNU project has the ambition of being an OS, since it compares itself to UNIX.

Also, there is no program included in linux.  Linux is a program.

From http://www.gnustep.org/ (http://www.gnustep.org/):

GNUstep currently supports Unix (GNU/Linux and GNU/HURD, Solaris, NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Darwin) and Windows.

Looks like we do call Mac OS X "Darwin", or at least GNU does.

I would also support calling Linux per GNU_OS if GNU wasn't such an ugly name. Linux has a catchy edge to it.

99.9% of the people can't care less about Richard Stallman's feelings. Linux is Linux and that's that.

according to https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Operating_system (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Operating_system):


key words: "Provides common services for efficient execution of various application software."  Let's be aware that we wouldn't be able to efficiently execute software without a terminal script (GNU's bash), coreutils to provide commands for humans to navigate computer and run programs (GNU's cat, ls, rm, chmod, cp, mkdir, cd, mv, printf, su, etc.), a compiler to convert high-level code of Linux kernel to various machine language (GNU's gcc), the ability to make common libraries and link them together with compiled object files to make executable files (GNU's ld), and many others key GNU components, at the least.


Apparently the long and complex Wikipedia decision making process has reached the verdict that GNU/Linux is indeed an operating system.

But yeah, I don't really care about Stallman's whining.