Comment by spijdar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spijdar | Hacker News Reader

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I think it's a sentimental thing, mixed with a dash of elitism/"purity seeking".

I don't mean that harshly. In my late teens/early 20s, I went through a "phase" where I obsessed with getting "purer and purer". This was mixed with a weird obsession with non-x86 hardware, as well. Lots of NetBSD, FreeBSD and Illumos usage, some Plan9 towards the end, lots of intellectual snobbery about "it feels better", and that sort of thing.

I'm almost 30 now, and my office has "Unix" systems from the 70s up to, well, my M1 MBP with "UNIX®" on it. PDP-11, VAX/ULTRIX, SPARC/SunOS 4, MIPS/IRIX, Alpha/OSF1, I've given them all a spin, running existing software and writing new software to kick the tires of old compilers. That's why I feel comfortable saying macOS really, really doesn't feel like any "UNIX" that I associate with "UNIX".

Although, UNIX was always a confusing term which never really meant all that much to begin with (when talking about commercial OSes/hardware platforms), but that's a whole other conversation...

> In my late teens/early 20s, I went through a "phase" where I obsessed with getting "purer and purer". This was mixed with a weird obsession with non-x86 hardware, as well. Lots of NetBSD, FreeBSD and Illumos usage, some Plan9 towards the end

Sounds really fun and informative!

> lots of intellectual snobbery about "it feels better"

How does that end up being intellectual (or snobbery, for that matter)? It sounds pretty close to "follow your heart" or "I just enjoy it" to me!

> Although, UNIX was always a confusing term which never really meant all that much to begin with (when talking about commercial OSes/hardware platforms), but that's a whole other conversation...

Seems like a relevant one, for this context ;)

That probably came off a bit too inflammatory/self-deprecating :)

The point for me was realizing that, even though I do like all these systems and OSes, and I understand the appeal of both "pure UNIX" and (on the opposite spectrum) OSes that violently reject "UNIX", this kind of purity isn't actually... useful.

End of the day, with most of the ways I use a computer for productivity, playing, or being social with other people, there are other things that matter a lot more than the "purity" of the OS. And this includes how much "real UNIX" it is. It's cool that Solaris/Illumos is "true blooded unix". And... it doesn't really matter that much. Whether or not a system is or isn't "unix" just doesn't matter, as long as it runs the software you want.

(And for a lot of modern software, "being unix-like" isn't enough; if you're not Linux, Windows, or macOS, good luck!)

The purity is also usually kind of a lie in the first place. I've got a VAX in my office running "real" 4.3BSD, before all the "POSIX-bloat" was added. But you look closely and realize there's tons of "bloat" added, for the purpose of making a more useful OS. There are mixed abstractions, redundant libc extensions, dubious system additions that look like one person needed something and added it in.

It's just so uninteresting to me now to argue about what is or isn't "unix". I still enjoy all those old OSes, but you kind of stop seeing them as "UNIX". The ways that each isn't UNIX is far more interesting, like how ULTRIX and OSF/1 abandoned "unix style" syslogs in favor of a rich binary format via 'uerf'.

I've experimented with all those platforms, and macOS feels to me like "Unix" as much as a Sun SparcStation or SGI Indy from 30 years ago.

What is "Unix" to you? To me, it's the common shell commands / utilities and a POSIX API. If I can download some GNU source, run ./configure; make; make install ... it's Unix.

Certainly, macOS is a "weird" Unix if you compare it to Solaris and look at the administrative bits. But, then again, IBM's AIX is very weird, too. And that's one of the few commercial Unix implementations still kicking.

> Certainly, macOS is a "weird" Unix if you compare it to Solaris and look at the administrative bits. But, then again, IBM's AIX is very weird, too. And that's one of the few commercial Unix implementations still kicking.

That's why I said that "Unix" has always been kind of confusing as a name, because a lot of "Unix"es are very different. I've never used AIX personally, but I know it's pretty funky. And there have been weirder "unix"es, Domain/OS was another weird one. At least a few others had split BSD/SysV "personalities", I've read.

> If I can download some GNU source, run ./configure; make; make install ... it's Unix.

On the one hand, I agree with this.

But then, by that standard, you could call basically every OS in use today "Unix", including Windows via Cygwin, or WSL, or etc...

To me, "Unix" is epitomized by Sun's fix for SunOS 4 for disabling Yellow Pages and using only DNS for hostname lookups.

Their official advice? To unpack the libc shlib, delete the object code for the Yellow Page functions, then repackage it into a new libc version.

That feels like Unix to me, in a way that macOS just never will be. Which is also perfectly okay with me.

So Unix has to feel like dealing with old cruft to you? ;) I remember the SunOS 4 days and the annoying setup process for DNS. Those were the first Unix systems I worked with in a professional capacity.

I have a Sparc in my collection but it's running Solaris and too new to run SunOS 4. I'm considering getting a Sparc 10 or something so I can relive the SunOS days. That was my favorite early 90's Unix. Most open source software had first class support for SunOS.

Linux is "Unix" in my mind, though not UNIX (TM). WSL follows, since it is really virtualization under the hood. (WSL2, at least.). Cygwin seems like a gray area... Unix-like environment maybe?

> So Unix has to feel like dealing with old cruft to you? ;)

Well, maybe :)

It's something about the system being made of a lot of messy parts which can be split apart and taped back together. Reductively, all computers are like this, but SunOS and other "unixes" are more easily put back together.

For instance, besides enabling DNS, I've extended the libc quite a bit, to get modern OpenSSL and curl to build, as well as KDE 1 just for kicks.

You can do the same with almost any OS (that doesn't lock you out with security), but it feels easier with a "Unix". Linux is also very like this!

> I have a Sparc in my collection but it's running Solaris and too new to run SunOS 4.

You could always run NetBSD and use COMPAT_SUNOS to run a SunOS chroot ;) I haven't tried running Xsun this way but it'd probably go...

Do you blog about any of this? Extending SunOS libc sounds pretty cool!

I did install OpenBSD on the Sparc (Ultra 5) at one point, before going back to an older Solaris. Maybe I'll try NetBSD next!

Haha, I haven't yet, but I want to. Maybe soon! Though extending libc isn't that exciting, really: that's kind of the cool (Unix-y??) thing about it. You just (IIRC) extract the static archive, add whatever .o object files with whatever symbols, add the symbols to a manifest, pack it up, and any C program on the system can call it. Since all C functions were implicit at the time (header files only had structs and enums) you can use trivially add whatever.

> Ultra 5

You should give it a shot! Even NetBSD/sparc64 has support for SunOS 4 binaries... allegedly.

If one was so inclined, you can abuse the kernel a bit and tell the compat layers to use root as their search path. I did this to make a "Linux system" with a NetBSD kernel and full GNU/Linux userland, just for kicks.

In my mind, you could do the same for SunOS. There's also COMPAT_MACH and COMPAT_DARWIN... imagine NeXT/SPARC binary compatibility alongside SunOS.

Hmmm. :)

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