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