Why Unix?

UNIX is a very powerful, easily extensible system that provides a solid, mostly stable, multitasking base with strong networking capabilities, upon which it is relatively easy to construct an OS of sorts. Windows' domination of the PC market probably comes out of the aggressive policies of the Microsoft management.

However, there are a couple of OSes that are not UNIX-based:

• Mac OS (pre-X), while arguably not quite "modern" (primitive cooperative multitasking), is at least recent, and not UNIX-based, nor Windows.
• BeOS, while UNIX-like (specifically POSIX compliant), is completely written from scratch.
• OS/2, dying though it may be

AmigaOS and VMS are another two OSes that are pretty modern, but not so recent, and both non-UNIX.

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Magenta tells me that BeOS isn't really POSIX compliant. It doesn't have a lot of critical function calls, such as select(). Also notable is that it's not multiuser.

Seen in the random nodes nodelet:

Why Unix?

• soft-serve ice cream
• overboiled
• Fashionableness
• Tuffies
• installing it prevents eyes like extinguished paper lanterns
• brutal honesty

Why is ariels noding this?

Because it's every bit as good as >95% of the "reasons" you'll hear for and against.

Evaluate it by your applications, not by your buzzword checklist.