Talk:Comparison of open-source operating systems

riscv missing

The "Supported Architectures" table has no column for riscv (32 or 64). This is almost as popular as ARM, with devboards everywhere. Would a kind soul improve the table with a riscv column? --~2026-16983-58 (talk) 08:28, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

OS or kernel: linux

Linux is not a name of an operating system. It is a name of a kernel. The proper name of the operating system is GNU/Linux. It needs to be decided whether the article is about operating systems or kernels only.

Why not represent linux by its distributions?.The most popular distros like Fedora,RHEL,Suse or Debian can be represented in the place of linux.It is a well known fact that a number of distributions make small changes or additions to the main linux kernel,thus making the kernels of these distributions unique.Linux distributions are different operating systems. Representing hundred operating systems as one could be inappropriate.--Yes-minister (talk) 14:28, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

I would agree with that. Saying that "Linux" is supported in all those architectures is misleading, as not all distros support all that hardware. Same applies on the software-side, not all of them bundle every piece of software refered to in this comparison.

Since all other OSs in the list are complete operating systems and not just a kernel, "Linux" should be change to one or a couple of representative distros to compare. Phobos11 (talk) 14:22, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

This is still a highly relevant comment! F J Leonhardt 13:51, 20 June 2019 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Fjleonhardt (talk • contribs)

more operating system

thinking of includeing these:
Contiki, K42

File system "support"`

This section is a real mess; at least for the bits I know about.

Realistically, this is either going to be Full, R/W, R/O or none - but the definition is still confused.

What counts as file system support anyway? Take ZFS for example. Linux doesn't support ZFS, but Linux based OS distributions can using user-space drivers after boot. Most complete OS can run utilities that allow access to any format you like. Does this count as support?

So, I suggest the following definitions:

Full: Built in to the kernel and able to boot from this FS. R/W: Can mount and read or write after boot without restriction. R/O: Can mount read-only after boot, but not write. none: May or may not be accessible using a utility, but can't be mounted and used transparently.

F J Leonhardt 14:00, 20 June 2019 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Fjleonhardt (talk • contribs)