Comment by npsimons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by npsimons | Hacker News Reader

(upfront confession: I love Linux)

Ah yes, the old "why did UNIX win? OtherOS was so much better!" chestnut. Reading the article, and yes, the usual suspects come up: VMS, TOPS-20, etc, etc. What I'd like to know is why these OSes were supposedly better, or at least list some of their advantages (eg, versioning filesystems[1]). I'm not questioning the pedigree of the author (someone who actually worked with almost a dozen really different OSes), but the article is almost vacuous, and entirely predictable.

I don't doubt that maybe back then UNIX was a dog (just look up the UNIX haters handbook sometime), and it would be really neat to see some revolutionary research in OSes gain traction (my interests in this area include too many to list, but Plan9, Coyotos and Oberon come to mind).

But I think a few important factors have lead to Linux leading the pack: first, it's open source. Second, "worse" is better[2]. And perhaps most important, Linux will (probably) be the last OS[3].

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versioning_file_system#Files-11...

[2] - http://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html

[3] - http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=101317&cid=863...

> Linux will (probably) be the last OS[3]

As a long time linux user I sincerely hope you're wrong about that.

There is definitely room for something more modern.

Are you talking about a new kernel or a new userspace? It's an important distinction.

I'd be very happy to see something like QnX, unix on the outside, robust message passing kernel with clustering built into the heart.

QnX is much more than just a neat little kernel to do embedded stuff with.

I remember working with QnX back in the mid-90s and found it quite fun (compared to Unix at the time). A friend of mine worked at a company that made commercial X servers and that company's fastest X server ran on QnX (yes, even with the overhead of message passing, it was faster than their Unix version on the same hardware).

Hummingbird by any chance?

No, it was Metro-X from MetroLink.

That vaguely rings a bell but I don't think I've seen it in action. Pity!

Maybe the future will bring us something like that again, I sure wouldn't mind. The nay-sayers argument that 'micro kernels are slow' seems to be mostly limited to those that have never actually used a micro-kernel based OS for anything. What I remember was - for the time especially - nothing short of astounding performance, 30K slices / second on a lousy 486/33 was not exceptional at all. At the time most other OSs were doing 20 or so...

The biggest takeaway I took from that comment on slashdot was that Linux changes and adapts: it's already more portable than just about anything out there, supporting more hardware than almost everything else, and we're already seeing the effects the comment talked about (ZFS being ported to Linux). It may not be Linux as we think of it today, but it will take something with significant advantages and wildly different design to both take over and not be amenable to being "ported" to Linux. I agree that it would be nice to see more variety, different designs, but if the only reason to change is because Linux isn't "more modern" (if that's true), that's not good enough. Change for the better? Certainly! Change for change's sake? No thanks.

I guess the point of the article is not "who's the best" neither in usefulness or cool features, but "diversity is good". Both to try new ideas (as you mention) and for diversity sake.

While I too love Linux and the pragmatic approach, it would be really sad if Linux really became the last OS.

Regarding the technically superior features of the mentioned OSs, I'm also curious and trying to find more info on them. ;)

That's the thing that gets me about a lot of posts (and this OP in particular). Here you have someone knowledgeable about the subject matter, but they've done little more than say "Harrumph! OSes used to be so much better! You kids don't know what you are missing!" and then not telling us what we are missing. Given that a large chunk of these OSes are consigned to the dustbin of history (either due to licensing, or lack of hardware to run them), it makes it harder to find out about them for ourselves. As the rule for writing goes, show, don't tell.

I'm not really saying the old OSes were better. In many ways we have come a long long way. Yes the command lines in the old OSes were better. They were easier to learn and understand. They had features that seem to be missing in many shells today. Things like autocomplete for example. But mainly I think we need more new stuff. Stuff I don't know is missing. I don't want a return to the old but a look to what would be new.

If you have to use a UNIX shell again, say bash, try looking into the bash_completions package (http://bash-completion.alioth.debian.org/). I hear tell that KSH and ZSH also do dynamic completions pretty well. Not sure if that's exactly what you mean, but I've found tab-completion to be getting better and better.

As for the great unknown, that sounds like basic research. Would love to see more of that stuff, but not many people seem to be paying for it. Still, much research is happening at universities around the world. If I hadn't given up on my postgraduate degree, that might be where I would be today :)

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