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Comment by fortran77 | Hacker News Reader

> The NT kernel is pretty nifty, albeit an aging design.

Unix is an Apollo-era technology! Also an aging design.

Except unix nowadays is just a set of concepts and conventions incorporated into modern OSs

What percent of Unix users are using a "modern OS" and what percentage are using Linux, which hasn't significantly changed since it was released in 1994?

let's be charitable, removal of global lock was fairly big change.

My point was that most people are using things like Linux, MacOS, etc. nowadays, which are all also pretty old by now but not nearly as old as ATT Unix

Linux has changed dramatically since its first release. It has major parts rewritten every decade or so, even. It just doesn't break its ABI with userspace.

Of course, I meant the design hasn't changed. Linux has had a lot of refactoring, and probably Windows has also.

How “modern” are they when they’re just a bunch of shell scripts on top of POSIX? SystemD caught up to NT4 and the original MacOS.

> SystemD caught up to NT4 and the original MacOS.

The transition happened to the huffing and puffing/kicking and screaming of many sysadmins.

Still a minority of sysadmins though. Most seem to have embraced it to an extent that's honestly a little sad to see. I liked to think of the linux community as generally being a more technical community, and that was true for a long time when you needed more grit to get everything running, but nowadays many just want Linux to be 'free windows'.

> nowadays many just want Linux to be 'free windows'

This means Linux has "made it."

> I liked to think of the linux community as generally being a more technical community, and that was true for a long time when you needed more grit to get everything running

I guess that grit was a gateway to a basic Linux experience for a long time - it did take a lot of effort to get a normal desktop running in the early to mid 90's. But that was never going to last - technical people tend to solve problems and open source means they're going to be available to anyone. There are new frontiers to apply the grit.

If by "modern" you mean stuff between 1930 and 1970, sure, most contemporany OSes can trace roots from that era.

Set of concepts derived from "whatever the hell Ken Thompson had in his environment circa 1972".

The "aging design" arguments holds water like a sieve. Electricity and engines are 1800s vintage designs The wheel is a prehistorical aging design american government is an aging design

The quality of an idea is independent of the time of its conception.

The utility of an idea is dependent on the time and place where it may be used however.

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