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pjmlp·

There is a book on that, gets posted every now and then on HN.

In case you never read it, https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

Hardly the piece of OS beauty that gets praised about FOSS circles.

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I'm not talking about the OS though but about the approach.

Goes to both, otherwise UNIX authors would not have tried to improve their creations, working on successors to both UNIX and C.

I love that book but isn’t it nearly 30 years old?

And yet many of the pain points are still kind of relevant, go figure.

But that book is a waste. It is just MIT dunning-krugerites who were salty that LISP machines never took off. When it comes to real life, the bell labs approach won, and for several good reasons. Not "worse is better" (another dunning-krugerite cope), but "less is more."

But your comment is a waste. It is just HN dunning-krugerites who were salty that the UNIX way never took off. When it comes to real life, the Poettering approach won, and for several good reasons.

The UNIX way is still doing fine on OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Alpine, Gentoo... Poetteringware only won on the distros selling support contracts. "Fixing" what wasn't broken is great for those businesses.

> for several good reasons

Such as money from M$?

Turns out free beer is great, even when it is warm.

The only good beer is warm beer. If the beer tastes like shit when it's warm, it's not good beer.

From your perspective, what would be an "OS done right"? I have a running list of things I would change in Unix, but replacing sysvinit with systemd's one-ring-to-rule-them-all would not be on it.

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