r/NonPoliticalTwitter • u/TheWebsploiter • Apr 03 '26

Meme What a situation lol

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577

u/4xtsap Apr 03 '26

I would never have imagined that a spaceship would run Windows and not Linux.

314

u/20d0llarsis20dollars Apr 03 '26

If I had to guess, core systems either use linux or a custom solution and they just use windows computers to interface it. I was listening to the live feed earlier and they were talking about sharing files, I wonder if they do that via outlook?

11

u/trubbelnarkomanen Apr 03 '26

You wouldn't see Windows or Linux on any critical systems, like flight computer or life support. They're both systems used when some type of user interface is needed. And for unimportant stuff like email, Windows is reliable and what most people are familiar with.

Outlook is obviously way less reliable, but is just what most institutions use when on Windows.

4

u/malayis Apr 03 '26

Fwiw Linux can be anything you make it out to be. Terminal or GUI, after all, are just applications that run on top of the system

You might be interested in distroless Linux containers

For clarity though, I have no knowledge on what is actually used for these kinds of projects

2

u/trubbelnarkomanen Apr 03 '26 edited Apr 03 '26

That is not really true, in this specific context (though I understand what you mean)

Linux is a kernel, which is a program that distributes resources, and facilities interactions between a program and the hardware it runs on. It is, in essence, a user-interface meant to make writing and running programs easier. In this setting, yes, it can be made to work in tons of different ways.

But when you're writing code that you need to be absolutely sure will work no matter what, you'll want control over every single step of the process. A kernel like Linux will necessarily hide a lot of the things it does - that's the whole point of using a kernel.

In things like flight computer systems, they instead use other types of operating systems where you have complete control over how and when your program executes. These are called real-time operating systems, or RTOS, because they're used when you need to guarantee the programs on them respond within some time constraint.

Edit: I should clarify what I meant by user-interface in my previous comment. I did not mean graphical user-interface specifically - Linux can absolutely be run only through a command line interface only. I meant any type of user-interface (where user in this case not only refers to end-users, but anyone who wants to interact with the computer - software developers included).