Nice to see a pro NT article for a change but there are some details wrong
“It’s true that Unix has attempted to shoehorn other types of non-file objects into the file system”
‘Everything is a file’ was Unix’s design principle from the very start. It wasn’t shoehorned in. It is IMO superior to NT’s object system in that everything is exposed to the user as the file system rather than hidden behind programming api’s.
Moving down the stack, Unix systems have never been big on supporting arbitrary drivers: remember that Unix systems were typically coupled to specific machines and vendors. NT, on the other hand, intended to be an OS for “any” machine and was sold by a software company, so supporting drivers written by others was critical. As a result, NT came with the Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS), an abstraction to support network card drivers with ease. To this day, manufacturer-supplied drivers are just not a thing on Linux, which leads to interesting contraptions like the ndiswrapper, a very popular shim in the early 2000s to be able to reuse Windows drivers for WiFi cards on Linux.
Unix is literally the most important operating system (specification) family on the planet. Even bigger than M$ Windows. You’ve got all the Android phones, all the Apple iPhones, macOS, FreeBSD and all the GNU/Linux distributions. Unix-like installed base is by far the largest of any on the planet.
This was most likely posted by a kid who just thinks Unix is “old” Linux and doesn’t understand the roots of what it actually means in terms of computing.
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