Let's Make Unix Not Suck [Miguel de Icaza] [2000] | Hacker News Reader

Let's Make Unix Not Suck [Miguel de Icaza] [2000]

primates.ximian.com

14 pointsrfreytag21 comments

I wonder if he would choose different terms today. UNIX does not suck as a desktop operating system. OSX proves you can build a fantastic OS on top of UNIX. It took Apple only a few years to do it right. What we're talking about is really a Linux/GPL/GTK/QT/etc problem isn't it? It's also a culture problem. There's basically no market for consumer Linux software because most Linux users prefer free OSS alternatives. It's irrelevant anyway -- the battle for desktop operating systems was over 25 years ago. Apple & Microsoft won. The future for Linux is mobiles & set tops. It's time to stop living in the past and focus resources on the future. Let's stop trying to fight lost wars.

Believe it or not, but Miguel is probably one of the most pro - Free Software that I have read and write to, even if OSX or Windows were so awesome in year 2000, he would still work on GNOME and the Linux desktop. That's just something he truly believes.

And I don't think Miguel or RMS should engage in a flame war, we owe too much to this two guys, literately they have written millions of lines of code, that run on almost every desktop computer today.

Was this article written recently? There are hints throughout that it might be a few years old.

Having said that, I think he generally makes good points.

One thing, though: I don't think his examples of bloated applications are indicative of a Unix problem. He tries to claim that these apps aren't reusing much code. But as far as I can tell, every application he lists is also ported to/from non-POSIX OSes (Netscape, Acrobat, Mathematica, Purify, FrameMaker, etc.). Reusing Unix parts wouldn't help them when they have to port to Windows, so yes, they probably do have all their own stuff.

This is a talk is from August 2000, when Miguel de Icaza had recently participated in the founding of Helix Code (later Ximian) which sponsored a lot of the early development of GNOME.

Is the first sentence driving ANYONE else completely up the wall?

The Unix system, designed and constructed in the 70s by people living in a very different world from us, and it has stagnated.

The Unix system and it has stagnated.

This talk dates from 2000. Any particular reason it's relevant now?

Because Unix still sucks, and de Icaza is being called a heretic for pointing out the bloody obvious: Microsoft does some things better, and are worthy of emulation.

today's Unix sucks less than the Unix of late 2000.

for instance, millions of consumers carry a Unix around in their pocket. if that isn't successful I don't know what is.

this is a nice rhetorical trick used to avoid thinking about the issue at hand.

"Successful" and "not sucking" are two very different things.

Unless you have a virtual monopoly, I fail to see how you can be successful if you suck? Why would anyone use your product at all?

RMS: De Icaza Traitor to Free Software Community

http://www.osnews.com/story/22225/RMS_De_Icaza_Traitor_to_Fr...

Isn't this really old? Gnome doesn't still use bonobo does it?

Some modules still use it but it is mostly marked as deprecated and will be removed in Gnome 3.0.

This was published more than nine years ago.

How is this news ?

I already lost all respect for this guy and now this. He complains about critics of Microsoft yet turns around and does the same thing those critics did. His title is a poor choice considering the criticism he is already drawing from his involvement in the Mono project. Admittedly, I rushed through the read because I have a plane to catch but I don't understand where he's coming from with this. It might only provoke and add more fuel to the suspicion he has turned "traitor" to the *nix and open source community.

He criticised Unix and the wrote how he and the GNOME team planned to fix the problems he delineated.

If you agree with his analysis, that makes him a huge boon to the Unix community, not a traitor. Even if you disagree with his analysis, that doesn't make him a traitor--it makes him a Unix developer who has ideas you do not agree with.

You'd have to prove his purposely trying to destroy the Unix community to call him a traitor.

The talk dates from 2000, if that helps...

He's ranting about it without having read it, so I doubt that's going to change his mind any.

This is a fairly old article from the beginnings of Ximian (hint at it's age that it was still called Helix Code). And most of his points are valid - Linux had a LONG WAY TO GO at the point he wrote this. Ximian did a lot to change that. Before Novell bought them, Ximian pushed their own more polished build of Gnome, and produced products like Evolution and the Exchange connector (then a paid, licensed product which was worth every penny for those of us stuck in companies using Exchange) which really changed the game for Linux on the desktop.

The reality is, as a few other people have said - not everything Microsoft does is bad. I'm of the opinion that their Apps (e.g. Office) and OS (e.g. "Vista") groups are the issue most people think of. Ancient, bloated code with no real vision, and stomping on the competition. Yet, if you look at what the .Net team does lately, they have fulltime Python and Ruby developers, they've made huge efforts to contribute code outward to the community and standardise things. There is cooperation happening, partly because people inside and outside Microsoft are making an effort to change things.

If you stand around beating the "Microsoft is evil" drum you at the least ignore the fact that Windows has ~80-90% Market share (roughly ad libbing #s from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows) for desktop computers. The reality is this: NOT EVERYTHING MICROSOFT DOES IS WRONG. They clearly are doing some things right, and the early Gnome efforts (from my observation and opinion at least) seemed to echo that fact in how they improved the UI and usability.

No, I'm not saying we should make Unix windows, and certainly I'm remembering this is an almost 10 year old article. I still recall the first install I did of a Linux with Gnome (early version, IIRC it was the first Red Hat that shipped Gnome). It was an incredible change, and wildly impressive.

Quite simply ,all other issues aside... Shouting down critics who suggest something you just don't want to hear rather than listening to their arguments is a rather poor approach to life; especially as a developer. I'm not making any claims of being a saint in that regard, but I've found most of the times I do it that I regret it.

Finally... read the article again. I can state from experience that most of what he claims was an issue at the time. And that most of it has been fixed in a lot of ways since. Linux today is what it is because people like Miguel worked hard to improve things, and listen to what other companies, open source or not, had to say.

Here's a thought: Spend the time to find everything that Miguel, Ximian, Gnome or anything else related projects have touched. Go ahead and uninstall them and see just how much you lose from Linux functionality.

I still have a set of Slackware 3.2 floppies in storage somewhere... that's a nice taste of the days before we started thinking "Maybe unix needs some improvement after all."

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