I have never thought that UNIX approach is the "best" in a universal sense.

But when compared to how large, slow, complicated and opaque the "alternatives" are, UNIX is the clear choice for me.

I can modify and recompile UNIX to meet my own ends. That is all but impossible if I chose an alternative such as Windows.

For example, if I do not want ls to have 30+ options, I can trim it down to just a few options and recompile.

There are other utilities besides ls for viewing file information, e.g., BSD stat(1) or mtree -cp. The later displays mode information in octal which is something ls, despite its 30+ options, does not do.

Or I can write my own simple utility. I am given the full UNIX source code. Where is the source code for Windows?

Personally I keep my filenames short and never use spaces, so I sometimes use the shell's echo builtin and tr(1) to get a quick list of files.

   echo * |tr '\040' '\012'

If there were non-UNIX alteratives that were small, simple and transparent, perhaps I might not be using UNIX.

Because I have become very comfortable with UNIX, any alternatives that others suggest have to be comparable with UNIX on size and simplicity before I will take them seriously.

Currently, I use a kernel source tree that compresses to under 40MB; I can compile kernels with about 200MB of RAM and fully loaded kernels are about 17MB. Userland utilities are usually around 5MB as I prefer to put them in the kernel's embedded filesystem. I do not like to rely on disks. My "IDE" is the same system I am compiling. There is no GUI overhead, everything can be done in textmode. The importance of the preceding two sentences cannot be understated.

I am always willing to consider non-UNIX alternatives that can offer the same or better flexibility, size constraints and simplicity.

But after decades of being open to alternatives, I am still not aware of any.