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!

i started reading with open mind, by second paragraph the troll smell started hitting my nostrils

Of course. Obviously linux is the 55^th version of nix – LVnix, not the 51^th.

I don’t think anyone on linuxmemes community though it was true. Maybe someone coming from /all

FFS you are right :-( this will popup in Facebook and others medias for sure

You mean 50501000s?

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.

I know, right. It’s disgusting this has been upvoted.

It should be 1001 for MInix. 101 was CInix.

horsesh.itjust.works

This could be a good thing. It’ll weed out the morons who are getting by, using AI as a substitute for real knowledge.

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.

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.

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.

yeh

Hey, grok is currently out of the office. I’ll handle this.

GET A LIFE, LOSER

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 ate it until they said LInix. I just guessed it was called Linux due to Linus Torvalds

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.

1. ^ 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.

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.