Not talking about all the Linux distros or different versions of Windows obviously. And my definition of “desktop” would be “able to connect to WiFi and launch a modern web browser”, since that would cover 90% of most people’s use cases.
I know of:
Windows
MacOS
GNU/Linux
GNU/Hurd
BSD
HaikuOS
What others are there?
openSUSE TumbleweedOS on every pc at my home. Glad my daughters will be raised with linux, and not MacOS or Windows.
MorphOS. My own PowerPC hardware is starting to be a bit dated for todays web, but the odyssey browser is modern enough for the interwebs.
What PowerPC computer do you use?
I run it on my maxed out most-recent 15" PowerBook G4.
This thing was a screamer back in 2005, but the web got very heavy.
TempleOS?
Your definition is very broad though, a device like a Nintendo Switch would be covered, even though that’s clearly not a desktop 😁.
I’d interpret their requirements as “desktop with WiFi and modern browser.”
enter Diogenes, holding a nintendo DS
One could argue that MacOS is basically BSD, but I guess that can be somewhat debatable.
There is Redox OS Unix like OS built in Rust. Never used it just know it exists.
Technically, Alpine Linux is Linux, sans GNU. Perhaps it can be called musl/Linux or busybox/Linux.
Absolutely tiny yet has a lot of functionality
Does that one actually support a fully modern web browser?
Not entirely sure, if ReactOS would count. Its documentation has a section on WiFi and one of the screenshots on their webpage shows Firefox, but that looks to be a rather old version of Firefox, so no idea if modern versions of it work, too, well, and how well the whole WiFi business works, too.
Well, and one could argue that it’s part of the Windows family.
QNX could qualify, but it’s not as easily available as most other OS.
Solaris is nearly dead for new development, but it’s still receiving updates (last release was 16 days ago) and can run GNOME and a browser.
OpenSolaris still lives on as OpenIndiana.
We ran SunOS on both desktops and servers when I was at uni.
Just for the record, MacOS is a descendant of FreeBSD. At least it was for quite a while.
It’s not. They just copied (literally) a few userspace tools from BSD back in the days, and rebased them to FreeBSD some time later.
Android?
Android is Linux. iPhone is iOS/MacOS. So I think those are covered depending on how you define “family”
In this context, I think two operating systems are in the same family if software for one can be recompiled for another with minimal changes without heavyweight compatibility libraries.
In that sense, I would put BSD and traditional desktop Linux distributions in the same family even though they don’t share low-level code, and I would exclude Android even though it uses the Linux kernel.
Isn’t MacOs based on BSD in the same vein?
