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A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

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Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#191

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #110
411111111111111 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux is considered a walled garden? Really? I mean yeah, there were more operating systems before, some of which were open.. but I'm not convinced it's necessarily bad to have one open system win. If it didn't, I'm pretty sure there would be a lot more people using windows servers, which I think would've been far worse for the open community.

> Linux is considered a walled garden? Really? Kinda, yeah. At least in the Desktop space it seems like it desperately wants to be and Canonical in particular works to push it in that direction. For instance, it is highly discouraged to install software from outside your distro's repository.

Talking about Canonical (which advocates Snaps as a supplement to the distro's repo) and "it is highly discouraged to install software from outside your distro's repository" in the same breath is rather odd.

As is thinking that Linux of all OSes is in any way a walled garden.

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#192

Post by maistho »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #84
lioeters wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you ever tried to read git documentation? It is the most useless godawful piece of nonsense I ran "man git" for the first time ever. https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/git.1.html Heey, that's actually pretty good! I don't think it's "godawful". In the second sentence it recommends starting with gittutorial and giteveryday, for a "useful minimum set of commands". https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7…

The issue with git is that no matter how well documented, the user interface is horribly designed. For starters, how many different things does "git checkout" do, and how many of them actually reflect an intuitive meaning of "checking out" ?

git has added `git restore` and `git switch`, intended to replace `git checkout` :)

https://git-scm.com/docs/git-restore https://git-scm.com/docs/git-switch

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#193

Post by imglorp »

pjmlp wrote: post #29
ginko wrote: post #12

Well, maybe more people would have used VAX/VMS or OpenVMS if it had been open source.

Well, that is the only reason why UNIX won and we got stuck with C, it is hard to win against free beer with source code available. The prices that Bell Labs was allowed to charge for symbolic UNIX licenses were a gift, when compared against traditional commercial OS prices in the 70's.

One more advantage was that C and UNIX were designed for portability. They started on PDP-7 and spread onwards from there.

VMS was designed to sell mainframes so your choices were limited outside of that until the pedestal and workstation market arose around 88 (Alpha), MicroVAX, etc. Even then it was only DEC hardware. That's how you kill an OS.

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#194

Post by guenthert »

lioeters wrote: post #76
reagent_finder wrote: post #44

Pretty much each point raised in this post(?) are correct, current and relevant even 26 years later. POSIX is a monolith and really deserves to be improved. It's been around forever, yes. It will probably keep on being around forever, yes. Take the tar command (please!), which is already a nightmare where lower-case `a' means "check first" and upper-case `A' means "delete all my disk files without asking" (or somethi…

> Have you ever tried to read git documentation? It is the most useless godawful piece of nonsense I ran "man git" for the first time ever. https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/git.1.html Heey, that's actually pretty good! I don't think it's "godawful". In the second sentence it recommends starting with gittutorial and giteveryday, for a "useful minimum set of commands". https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7…

> I ran "man git" for the first time ever.

> But the man pages are my first go-to

It's not strictly a logical contradiction, but doesn't make much sense either.

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#195

Post by arexxbifs »

einpoklum wrote: post #174
SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I then tell them to check with "echo $SHELL" if they're on another system than the one we are working on, and if they don't see "/bin/bash" or "/usr/bin/bash" then they should ask someone for help. Some systems will be weird. EG my default shell is bash, but my interactive shell for all my terminal emulators is fish. So "echo $SHELL" returns "/bin/bash", even from fish. Of course I know this, I set it up this way d…

Hmm... interesting. But - echo $SHELL should tell you what the current shell is, not what the default shell is.

$SHELL should typically be set to reflect the configured login shell, I.E. the shell specified in /etc/passwd. Or, as POSIX[0] puts it: "This variable shall represent a pathname of the user's preferred command language interpreter." The currently running shell is not necessarily the "preferred" shell, for example if you're doing "xterm -e zsh" or running a specific ksh script when you normally prefer (log in to) bash.

Being vaguely defined, it is of course open to interpretation and might vary from system to system, thus being a prime example of the kind of frustrating Unix gotchas that spawned the original article.

[0] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1...

Edit: To tie in to my earlier comment - where should I look for info on this variable in Linux? I know it exists, but how do I find out more about the behavior? 'apropos "\$SHELL"' gives me nothing. 'apropos SHELL' gives me a list of commands which doesn't include much of interest. Digging deeper, there's login(1), which briefly touches the subject, and environ(7), which gives a good description of it but of course dives in head-first and starts off by describing an array of pointers. Not overly helpful for the novice.

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#197

Post by [deleted] »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #191
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux is considered a walled garden? Really? Kinda, yeah. At least in the Desktop space it seems like it desperately wants to be and Canonical in particular works to push it in that direction. For instance, it is highly discouraged to install software from outside your distro's repository.

Talking about Canonical (which advocates Snaps as a supplement to the distro's repo) and "it is highly discouraged to install software from outside your distro's repository" in the same breath is rather odd. As is thinking that Linux of all OSes is in any way a walled garden.

[deleted]

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#198

Post by ThinkBeat »

3np wrote: post #69
normanmatrix wrote: post #66

I have a feeling that Windows Nano Server w/ Powershell + .NET Core might make this text relevant again soon. Having a consistent OS that scales from containers to servers and desktop is a big benefit in corporate. Now if it matched performance of an Alpine, played well with WSL, and Microsoft would manage to push the major open source stuff for compatibility. I'd give Linux 5 years. But only time will tell..

I really, really hope that you're wrong. I optimistically hope a not-too-future (within 10y?) major version update of Windows is in reality a *nix distribution. As long as they can keep runtime compatibility with older versions of Windows software, I think it'd be a big win for Microsoft for various reasons. The only real challenge would be to get driver vendors in line.

Why would you want that? That is the last thing I want.

It is like saying that in ten years we will only have Pepsi Cola. As the only soft drink. You can get Pepsi Cola Mint ,Pepsi Cola Cherry, Pepsi Cola regular etc.

But no matter what it will always be Pepsi Cola.

I want more, a lot more viable operating systems than we have ow. Now is a sad place to be.

Linux was never created to be a modern operating system.

Parts in Windows NT -> were derived from VMS, though more and more of it removed. Some parts were removed and had to be reinvented (WSL).

Bacm in the days, you could pick different hardware you could pick different oses (often tied to specific hardware).

I liked Atari ST TOS/GEM. I thought it was way ahead of its time.

I did not think that PCs in the beginning of the Atari STs were even comparable. Lots of peple loved the Amiga, great machine. Some people had the Archimdes. (ARM). You had Macs with PowerPC. Lots of choice and lots of competition.

Now you buy a computer of a specific design with little direct competition, though that is improving now.

And you can pick between Linux or Windows.

A single computer architecture. A singe choice +1 for operating systems.

I would really want to own a POWER powered Linux machine but the are tragically expensive.For the most part they do share the same architecture still.

On mobile, we have Android or iOS. Android has a lot of shared architecture for obvious reasons and iOS most certainly does.

It is like the American election, which white geriatric misogynists would you like?

Linux is fully geriatric. WindowsNT is getting there too.

Can we please have a couple of teenage operating systems? Some new viable babies?

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#199

Post by michaelcampbell »

mimixco wrote: post #185

Unix is the ultimate example of "worse is better." VMS, which is what the article is about, was definitely more elegant, easier to grok, and far better documented. So was IBM's VM which had what we now call "containers" working simply and reliably 30 years ago.

> VMS, which is what the article is about,

Interesting then that it barely mentions VMS.

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#200

Post by wk_end »

masklinn wrote: post #177
tomxor wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the user interface is horribly designed I see this type of remark against git quite often on HN and I think it's exaggerated. I agree some of the porcelain are misleading and overloaded as convenience functions such as checkout, however a decent chunk of it is inline with the underlying data structure. Nothing is perfect, and git is pretty damn good - horribly designed? no, could do with some breaking porcelain re-…

The git UI is absolutely horribly designed, as demonstrated by the mercurial or darcs UIs which, while completely different, were significantly easier to discover, intuit and remember. > git is pretty damn good UI-wise, it really is not.

Single data point, but I used hg for three years at work and never warmed up to it the way I've warmed up to git (and that's the "porcelain" too, I've never done a deep dive into the plumbing).
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