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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 29th, 2023

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  • matter and thread are different things fyi…

    thread uses the same wireless communication as zigbee (zigbee has other stuff on top of it), so is a low power wireless protocol

    matter is the data format that devices use to communicate on top of an IP-based network like wifi or thread. it’s meant to standardise all these competing “works with google” “works with alexa” “homekit compatible”: if it works with matter, it should work with any coordinator that has matter compatibility (which all the big ones do these days)

    thread will work great if the wifi is down - same as zigbee!

    matter also (afaik) forces local devices: your coordinator (a homepod, alexa, etc) talks directly to the device without going through the internet. again, same as zigbee


  • i certainly don’t agree that system utilities and libraries are outside of that limit and said as much when i commented on Debian GNU/kFreeBSD: its its own thing… its neither debian, nor freebsd. it is however based on both

    the gui is definitively part of the operating system - confirmed by that wikipedia page that you linked (though i’d say only in the case where the gui is heavily tied to the default configuration of the OS like windows, macos, android, etc), and that’s nowhere near the kernel


  • and my point is that these things aren’t definitions that have particularly concrete categories… an operating system is not a single thing: it can be many different things which include things like GUIs even… as much as we try to fit the world into neat little boxes, that’s just not how things work

    even the categories of operating systems is messy: take single user vs multi user… macos is single user, but openbsd is multi user… in the beginning, the kernel was largely the same but due to the system tools and configuration, macos became a different classification of operating system

    it’s all super messy, and saying that windows vista and windows 11 are the same operating system is extremely reductive