131–140 of 616 posts
"We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy." Rob Pike 2004, h…
Although I agree that Unix is a big collection of hacks and well past its prime, the author displays several fundamental misconceptions of what he's talking about. Here's a few examples: - Dirty hacks in UNIX started to arise when UNIX was released, and it was long before Windows came to the scene, I guess there wasn’t even Microsoft DOS at the time (I guess and I don’t bother to check, so check it yourself). At leas…
> What would you name 'grep' instead? Yeah, I found that one an especially weird gripe. Grepping was a new thing, so we needed a word for it. 'Grep' is short, easy to say and type, and relatively hard to confuse with similar words in the domain. Works for me. I can unfortunately imagine a modern startup implementing it, and shudder at potential names my imagination is coming up with... Searchlr, the best way to searc…
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"Installing software was a mess." Of all the things to complain about in Linux, you choose the one thing that Mac OS and Windows still don't have right, and Linux had pretty good even back then?
Installation on Windows was always much easier; all programs had a relatively consistent UI wizard that stepped you through the installation process. Installing software from disks on Windows was really convenient (and disks where the real deal back then). The fact that Linux relied on people to install stuff with the command line was a massive oversight. UIs are just way more intuitive than shell commands.
I've rarely disagreed with something said on HN so strongly (at least among things that, in the grand scheme of things, really don't matter that much, but they matter a lot to my personal experience).
"The fact that Linux relied on people to install stuff with the command line was a massive oversight. UIs are just way more intuitive than shell commands."
This has never been true in the past 12 years. You have to go back even further to find a time when there weren't multiple GUIs for the leading package managers. And, for at least the past decade, the core GUI experience on every major Linux distro has had some sort of "Install Software" user interface that was super easy and provided search and the like.
There's lots of things Linux got wrong (and some that it still gets wrong) that Windows or macOS got right. Software installation really just isn't one of them, IMHO.
It's the thing I miss most when I have to work on Windows or macOS, and I miss it constantly...like multiple times a day. A good package manager is among the greatest time savers and greatest sources of comfort (am I up to date? do I have this installed already? which version? where are the config files? where are the docs? etc.) when I use any system, particularly one I haven't seen in a while.
I just really love a good package manager, and Linux has several. Windows and macOS have none (because if the entire OS didn't come from a package manager, it's useless...you can't know what's going on by querying the package manager, if the package manager only installed a tiny percentage of the code on the system). So, even though there's choco on Windows and Homebrew (shudder...) on macOS, they are broken from the get-go because they are, by necessity, their own tiny little part of the system with little awareness or control over the OS itself.
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"Installing software was a mess." Of all the things to complain about in Linux, you choose the one thing that Mac OS and Windows still don't have right, and Linux had pretty good even back then?
Installation on Windows was always much easier; all programs had a relatively consistent UI wizard that stepped you through the installation process. Installing software from disks on Windows was really convenient (and disks where the real deal back then). The fact that Linux relied on people to install stuff with the command line was a massive oversight. UIs are just way more intuitive than shell commands.
No where near as consistent as installing from a package manager.
> The fact that Linux relied on people to install stuff with the command line was a massive oversight. UIs are just way more intuitive than shell commands.
Every user orientated distro has come with a GUI package manager for at least a decade, probably two.
"This article was written hastily, and I don’t want to further improve it. You’re lucky I wrote it. Therefore, I may provide some facts without source links." I guess I am lucky he wrote this for a pleb like me.
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That's not true. Windows in particular is greatly limited by past design choices, such as filename limitations, the security model, the fact that many programs have to be run as administrator because that's how they were written years ago, etc. There's nothing preventing you from running different language runtimes and such on Linux/Unix systems; people do it all the time. Have you not noticed Mono? It's been around…
Windows 10 already sorted out the filename limitations. A few more releases and in around 10 years, Win32 will be drinking beers with Carbon. Mono and Qt don't change the architecture of UNIX and their adoption across UNIX variants isn't a game changer.
No, it hasn't. Filenames are still case-insensitive (and in a terrible way, where it seems to remember how they were first typed but that can never be changed), backslashes are still used for path separators instead of escaping characters, and the worst of all is that drive letters are still in use, which is an utterly archaic concept from the days of systems with dual floppy drives. Also, try making a file with a double-quote character in it, or a question mark. I've run into trouble before copying files from a Linux system to a Windows system because of the reserved characters on Windows.
>Mono and Qt don't change the architecture of UNIX and their adoption across UNIX variants isn't a game changer.
Nothing you've mentioned has changed the architecture of Windows. The fundamental architecture of Windows hasn't changed at all since WinNT 4.0 (or maybe 3.5); it just has an ugly new UI slapped on top and some slightly different administration tools.
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I did not know about this! http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf It even has an anti-foreword by Dennis Ritchie which kinda reminds me of the Metropolitan Police spokesman's blurb on the back of Banksy's book. BTW, it starts off with an anonymous quote that I've never heard, Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. Unix is of course from Bell Labs. And anyone who knew anything would have said i…
From the book: "Did you know that all the standard Sun window applications (“tools”) are really one massive 3/4 megabyte binary?" Oh for the days when 750kB was considered "massive" for a binary.
This article was written hastily, and I don’t want to further improve it. You’re lucky I wrote it. I feel so privileged to read this random guy's blog, and it's terrific that he eschews inflating his ego so well.
Isn't this ironically referencing a lot of Unix development?
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I did not know about this! http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf It even has an anti-foreword by Dennis Ritchie which kinda reminds me of the Metropolitan Police spokesman's blurb on the back of Banksy's book. BTW, it starts off with an anonymous quote that I've never heard, Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. Unix is of course from Bell Labs. And anyone who knew anything would have said i…
And LSD is of course from Albert Hofmann [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Hofmann