Very different. Once, when visiting the Lisp machine, I saw astonishingly irrelevant things being done as first class emacs commands, and asked how many commands there were. The instant answer was to have emacs print the list. Nice, but it scrolled way beyond one screenful. I persisted: could the machine count them? It took several minutes of head-scratching and false starts to do a task that was second nature to Unix hands. With hindsight, I realize that the thousand emacs commands were but a foretaste of open-source exuberance--witness this snippet from Linux: !ls /usr/share/man/man2|wc 468 468 6766 Even a "kernel" is as efflorescent as a tropical rainforest.