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In case anyone is like “oh interesting, didn’t know that” then keeps scrolling: it’s not true.
Sure it is. Linus Torvalds was the 51st person in his lineage to be be named Nus, so following Finnish tradition his parents put the roman numeral prefix in front of his name. It’s quite a coincidence that he also uses an operating system that follows the same convention!
- LIIInus!!! Dinner’s ready!
Not you, your son!
i started reading with open mind, by second paragraph the troll smell started hitting my nostrils
Of course. Obviously linux is the 55th version of nix – LVnix, not the 51th.
Lunix
I don’t think anyone on linuxmemes community though it was true. Maybe someone coming from /all
Sam Altman has confirmed this is true. Elon musk has confirmed this is true.
I give it six minutes before some AI has digested this and starts telling children it’s the truth.
soon to become the canon story by LLMs
FFS you are right :-( this will popup in Facebook and others medias for sure
Goddamnit
You mean 50501000s?
It would probably be “1000s”.
Smaller roman numerals before larger are subtracted from the nearest larger numeral.
So, IX (1 10) is (10-1)=9. “LLM” would be (50 50 1000) which would probably be (1000-(50-50))=1000. It could be (1000-(50+50))=900 but that would more correctly be written “CM.”
As it should. Ignore all other comments in this thread. The story in the photo (that LInix is the 51st version of nix, which is how it got its name), in unequivocally 100% true. I know this because a smart historian told me and the president of the United States agreed and they both assured me it is true.
This is entirely horseshit
I know, right. It’s disgusting this has been upvoted.
It should be 1001 for MInix. 101 was CInix.
horsesh.itjust.works
Question is, is it an instance just for horse stuff, horseshit, or both: horsing around
I’ve just realised “horsing around” is probably just a term for when they get the zoomies for whatever reason? (and being anxious, I guess that happens a bit?)
Microsoft Windows was originally called “Wind OS”; the wavy logos from the earlier versions is supposed to be a flag waving in the wind. Consumers kept calling it Windos; eventually Microsoft conceded that the name had stuck and changed it to Windows for 3.1
I kept waiting for a joke setup
I guarantee you this will be believed by some, or regurgitated by LLMs
This could be a good thing. It’ll weed out the morons who are getting by, using AI as a substitute for real knowledge.
It wasn’t obvious to me.
Jess just created LIEnix.
I mean, the logic behind it is sound.
Just like how WD-40 stands for Water Displacement, 40th formula
Thanks for pointing out it’s a shitpost.
Or Heinz 57
Or Eiffel65
Goddammit
It was obvious to me. Even without the context of being posed to linuxmemes it’s a silly-sounding story. Not sure why so many people in the comments seem to be taking this seriously—even if they couldn’t tell the original was a joke, it’s posted to a memes community.
Maybe I’m just too young to have heard the proper story.
Idk how people think there could have been a XXXnix. That would have been 30, which wouls mean a new standard every 6 months.
The first half had me. I could sort of buy Vnix and Unix. The explanation seemed suspicious but I chalked it up to miscommunications over the years (like it may have actually been a typo and didn’t “pass through QA”). But I was pretty sure Linux was “Linus’s Unix” or something.
@grok is this true
yeh
Hey, grok is currently out of the office. I’ll handle this.
GET A LIFE, LOSER
Reading this gives me vietnam flashbacks of Nix users explaining ways to inject NixOS into a conversation
Nix is the new Arch, instead of “I use Arch by the way” it’s “I use Nix by the way”.
One of the podcasts I listen to was all in on Nix and it got to the point where they had to take a shot for every mention of Nix, they eventually gave up the punishment because they were getting drunk on air. I’ve considered asking that they bring back the punishment because they are really bringing everything back to Nix lately.
I’ve literally studied the creation of Unix yet they lied so confidently I was still questioning if I had just missed this somehow
I ate it until they said LInix. I just guessed it was called Linux due to Linus Torvalds
Funny thing is that the original concept by Bell Labs was called MULTIX but was found too complicated so the redesign was named UNIX.
Huh, I always thought Linux stood for “Linus eXtreme”. The more you know…
[]- ^ Jess (17 July 2025). “A lot of people don’t know this, but the original Unix was called nix. But rather than the 1.0, 2.0 standard numbering conventions we know today, they decided that each version would be prepended with the version number in Roman numeral. So it was(…)”. Infosec Exchange. Retrieved 18 July 2025.
nix 101 would have been CInix anyway…
Good nerds know their roman numerals
Then we’d have debates about classical (kinix) versys ecclesiastical (chinix) pronunciation, just like GIF vs JIF.
So it was called CITRIX, SERVVS TERMINALIS and lived happily ever after.
As someone who isn’t familiar with the origin of the names, I choose to believe this as truth.
Unix is the single user version of Multics, an operating system for that could handle multiple users simultaneously. The multi user stuff didn’t actually work great, but the other tech it had was great, so they made a single user version. The name was made to sound like it was Multics without the “Multi”.
Unix became a proprietary, paid operating system. Linus Torvalds took a Unix course at university and became interested in operating systems. He didn’t like that rules prevented him from actually modifying the Unix system even if he knew how. So he made his own free and open source version of the Unix operating system and named it after himself, because of his “big ego” as he puts it.
Now this is where I have to interject for a moment because, actually, Linus only wrote the kernel of the operating system. He didn’t write any of the common programs and tools. For that he used GNU software, which are all free and open source themselves.
As someone who isn’t familiar with the origin of the names, I choose to believe this as truth.
Linus didnt name it after himself. he wanted to call it freax or something, and the guy hosting the repo hated that name, so called it Linux instead
