My complaints with unix (as someone running linux on every device, starting to dip my toe into freebsd on a vps); apologies for lack of editing:
> everything is text
I'd often like to send something structured between processes without needing both sides to have to roll their own de/serialization of the domain types; in practice I end up using sockets + some thrown-together HTTP+JSON or TCP+JSON thing instead of pipes for any data that's not CSV-friendly
> everything (ish) is a file
> including pipes and fds
To my mind, this is much less elegant when most of these things don't support seeking, and fnctls have to exist.
It'd be nicer if there were something to declare interfaces like Varlink [0, 1], and a shell that allowed composing pipelines out of them nicely.
> every piece of software is accessible as a file, invoked at the command line
> ...with local arguments
> ...and persistent global in the environment
Sure, mostly fine; serialization still a wart for arguments + env vars, but one I run into much less
> and common signalling facility
As in Unix signals? tbh those seem ugly too; sigwinch, sighup, etc ought to be connected to stdin in some way; it'd be nice if there were a more general way to send arbitrary data to processes as an event
> also nice if some files have magic properties like /dev/random or /proc or /dev/null
userspace programs can't really extend these though, unless they expose FUSE filesystems, which sounds terrible and nobody does
also, this results in things like [2]...
> every program starts with 3 streams, stdin/stdout for work and stderr for out of band errors
iow, things get trickier once I need more than one input one one output. :)
I also prefer something like syslog over stderr, but again this is an argument for more structured things.
[0]: https://varlink.org/
[1]: ideally with sum type support though, and maybe full dependent types like https://dhall-lang.org/
[2]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=UEFI-rm-...