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Comment by erokar | Hacker News Reader

I really wish developers today (in the 2000s, for Christ's sake) didn't have to deal with such a horrible UI.

The Unix Hater's Hanbook says it well: "The original Unix solved a problem and solved it well, as did the Roman numeral system, the mercury treatment for syphilis, and carbon paper. And like those technologies, Unix, too, rightfully belongs to history. It was developed for a machine with little memory, tiny disks, no graphics, no networking, and no power."

Bu since wee seem to be stuck with Unix, I guess we need any guidance we can get.

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Feel free to abstract away the entire shell. The shell is merely a command-driven REPL that interacts with the kernel API, rewrite the shell however you want with an embedded interpreter like how Emacs eshell works (learn one shell, works across every OS Emacs is ported to).

Can also just script shell commands and create levels of abstraction to suit whatever simple layer of abstraction suits you. This is what things like Nautilus File Manager do to manipulate files with a mouse.

I enjoy Unix and the Unix philosophy, but I'm legitimately interested: what would a better system look like to you?

I'll take this one:) http://housejeffries.com/articles/unix-delenda-est

I criticize Unix because I think it's getting in the way of the adoption of what I really love: the CLI.

Really a much better article is this one, but I didn't write it: https://mkremins.github.io/blog/unix-not-acceptable-unix/

There's the rather entertaining talk "A Whole New World" by Gary Bernhardt1[1]. The first time I saw it I was quite disappointed such a system didn't exist.

[1]: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new-world

I'm just riffing here but maybe the reason we're stuck on *nix is because it came from a time before The Cloud, subscription software, sharecropper software, etc. It was made to make you more productive; Not to make you #<whatever> of #<whatever> user of Super.os.

OSes weren't worth a whole lot; Money was made on the hardware and the applications. How do you make people productive? Give them an OS that enables productivity.

Unix succeeded because AT&T didn't recognize the value of what they had.

demonstrate your improvement

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_%28operating_system%29

Personally, I think that if 1% of the resources that have gone into various Unixes had gone into either of these systems, the outcome would have been far superior.

Plan 9 started as an off-shoot of Research Unix and in some ways it is the raw, unfiltered Unix ideal, along the way influenced from work done at PARC and ETH Zurich. By and large the GNU/Linux community seems to be drifting away from Unix as far as possible.

Genera certainly sets a bar for a single-user workstation.

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