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Comment by blackhaz | Hacker News Reader

When I started learning Linux when it was, I think, 0.99, I appreciated that so many commands where cross-Unix. It was a Unix lookalike. I could watch how something is done on one Unix, type this stuff into my Linux terminal, and get an equivalent result in Linux, and this helped a lot and created a sense of community. Now I see that Linux tears the standards apart, there are more and more obstacles with porting complex applications. More over, we can also see the emergence of "we support Ubuntu only, sorry" mentality - Linux became very diverged. I'm so happy to be using FreeBSD now on all my boxes, with it's init, ifconfig, file system hierarchy.

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Yup, you could say that again. I cut my teeth in Linux while in high school for the most path. First year of college, I go to the engineering labs to get a job, it's all SunOS/Solaris. It's like driving a car! There were very few commands that were different!

Now, Linux is slowly going rouge and changing everything in the supposedly name of "progress" I'm still salty as hell with the systemd rubbish. The problem is that all the cool toys are supported better on Linux and I don't feel like compiling from source for most things. :-(

You do realize Solaris implemented a service management system (which is also superior to systemd; and was also created prior to systemd's conception), right ? They switched away from legacy SysV init scripts BEFORE systemd existed.

> superior to systemd

SMD was based around XML, which caused a lot of boaking.

systemd was based around .desktop, aka .ini syntax.

SMF was quite nice. Solaris was incredible in a lot of ways. I always wonder why it never took off.

> I always wonder why it never took off.

Because Larry Ellison bought Sun.

"I always wonder why it never took off."

It did take off and had a long and productive life.

Many, many of the early ISPs and webhosting providers were built on Solaris 2.6 and "7". In the late nineties it was very common to go into a datacenter and see racks full of ultra 2 boxes stacked on one another ...

If you went to college between 1992 and 1999 you were almost assured to log into a SunOS or Solaris system to read your email or ftp or whatever.

It was only when the dot-com money dried up that people (including myself) made the switch to PC based servers in an effort to save money.

Because nobody were interested?

Damn it, Apple have a similar thing going in OSX (or whatever their greasy marketing wants to call it this year) but when it was basically offered to the BSDs on a silver platter they didn't want it.

Implying that launchd and SMF are similar shows how little you know about both systems.

Launchd is mostly crappy, obtuse plist files, a semi-broken DAG, socket activation that spins your machine to death.

SMF was an access point to many things, it was clean, concise and pointed you towards the actual things that the OS provided. (like; log files) It was a pleasure to work with.

The only problem was that service definitions were configured with XML, I have never been a fan of XML.

A lot of these changes are reminding me, a 40+ year old recovering sysadmin, that I am being left behind by the technology world.

I would imagine that there are a few others in the thread that read this article and felt similar.

Not even that old, and i feel it every damned day...

Not to say I would be a great fan of Linux, but I think at this point it's quite clear it's the huge winner of OSes. Nearly all servers run on it nowadays, I think all relevant smartphones (not sure though, correct me if that's wrong), many desktop/laptop computers and even Windows is integrating more and more with Linux.

With such a dominance there is not much point in syncing changes of the standard with other OSes. The moment it works different in Linux that is the new majority standard.

And while a lot more stuff is changed all the time than would be necessary one also can't expect things to stay the same for another 100 years just because they have been like that for a long time.

Yeah, the BSDs were the winner too at one point, so was Sun and even WindowsNT. Don't underestimate how fast it takes to fall from grace.

> Don't underestimate how fast it takes to fall from grace.

Fully agree.

> the BSDs were the winner too at one point

When was that point? Strong doubts about that.

Mostly thanks Torvalds accepting just about anything into the kernel, not wanting to play politics if someone rolls a kernel with some drivers that are not GPLed, and keeps a strict API/ABI stability.

Above the kernel it is a wild west, with each "platform" implementing their own stack for anything beyond the core-utils (and those are more likely to be busybox based than GNU based for political reasons).

Kernel won, userland didn't.

And they still run around going "lalalala"...

It's not the first time I hear it, but what is it supposed to mean? Is there a single thing that can be called "linux userland"? Also, I doubt that someone combines Linux kernel with Windows XP userland. So in some regard all userland tooling running on the linux kernel might be considered "linux userland".

If I understand the term userland correctly it is a term from kernel developers to say "this is code that doesn't run in the kernel", so it might not be helpful to any popularity discussion at all.

> Also, I doubt that someone combines Linux kernel with Windows XP userland.

That's Wine.

I think you're over-romantascizing the past here.

Linux dropped the cost of using UNIX down to zero. And it's not like everything was this cross-UNIX Utopia where things worked from system to system consistently and reliably.

We went from a set of highly proprietary and expensive OSes that ran on hardware that a common person had no access to to something that nearly anyone can use.

That's way more important than having to adjust your skill set for new tools over time!

> Linux dropped the cost of using UNIX down to zero.

"Linux is only free if your time has no value."

I've been using it personally and professionally for over 20 years now. Unless you're specifically using the term "cost" to mean solely money, it is in no conceivable way without cost. There is, for example, a significant cognitive burden involved in keeping up with the ceaseless parade of travesties committed by people trying to "make things better" in Linux, who instead just compromise the system for those of us who disagree with their notions of betterness.

I'm reminded entirely too much by some corners of the Linux community of Apple's "We know what users want, and give it to them good and hard" attitude.

> Linux dropped the cost of using UNIX down to zero.

BSD had already done that, better, and earlier. Let's not try to rewrite history.

Not true. AT&T claimed that the free versions of BSD violated their copyright on Unix with the result that even though anyone could download and install BSD at no cost, you never knew whether a court ruling would make your continuing to use it legally risky (at least if you want to use it in an enterprise or keep it connected to the net).

The legality of the free versions of BSD did not get resolved till there were many Linux users -- probably more Linux users than there were users of the free BSDs.

Consistency is great, but there’s a trade off between consistency and innovation. In a sense, what you’re describing is stagnation.

OpenBSD's ifconfig did not stagnate. It handles aliases, bridges, wifi, etc.

No, the issue is that no one at GNU or Linux cares about correct, simple tools (2 APIs for networking in the kernel?! What happened to manpages?! WTF info?). And thanks to that it runs on anything.

Pick your poison

https://man.openbsd.org/ifconfig.8

net-tools is not a GNU software package, note.

* https://sourceforge.net/projects/net-tools/

* https://www.gnu.org/software/software.html

I'm not sure what the point you are making here is. The developers behind "ifconfig" on Linux could support the new API (iproute2) just as the developers behind "ifconfig" on OpenBSD updated their software to support the new kernel API as they became available.

The point is that in the BSDs, ifconfig is developed and released together with the kernel.

See, for example, https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=31237..., where the author added support for hardware packet pacing. The commit touches ifconfig, socket header files, and various parts of the kernel all in one atomic change.

So, if I'm understanding this correctly, your point is that Linux is a kernel ? Haven't we moved past this ?

Nothing stops anyone from offering patches to multiple projects to sync development. Hell, some of the biggest changes crossing the kernel/userspace divide have just that.

It's not stagnation if the majority system (Linux) makes an effort to reach consensus with the minority systems (*BSD) on changes and improvements. It is unclear to me that that happens to any meaningful degree.

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