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The Unix philosophy has been abandoned at this point. What advantages have we really gained from it? More gaping security flaws? Unnecessary centralization is p

by archy_ 7y ago

The Unix philosophy has been abandoned at this point. What advantages have we really gained from it? More gaping security flaws? Unnecessary centralization is pushing the old Unix admins who laid the groundwork for Linuxs success into BSDs and other alternatives, and the Linux kernel will likely rot as a result. Could we consider this moment the peak of Linux development?

jamespo 7y ago
Not everyone likes writing shell scripts to start services
- nisa 7y ago
  Not everyone wants to talk dbus to configure the firewall :P
  - pas 7y ago
    I just put iptables shit into /etc/rc.local and it works, no dbus needed :)
    - nisa 7y ago
      this was just a stupid comment on firewalld
- hedora 7y ago
  I haven’t written an init script in ten years. It is like coming home one day, and the house has been demolished. There’s a joker in a bulldozer proudly proclaiming there was some dog crap on the sidewalk, and that he took care of it for me.
  - Scramblejams 7y ago
    Solid analogy. In the case of Systemd, it was fixing problems for me that I never had, and creating problems that I'd also never had: It broke laptop sleep. It broke /etc/rc.local. It broke domainless local DNS lookups. It broke boot on one of my servers (fstab's new nofail argument? really?) And it (soft) broke a keyboard of mine. A keyboard! Astonishing. I really wish Debian had not drunk that particular kool-aid. :'( I'd go somewhere else but Debian (and by extension Ubuntu) have been doing binary package management the longest, and for me it really shows. I want these boxes to just sit there for years, be extremely low maintenance and only pick up security updates, and I've never gotten a better experience anywhere else.
    - hrangozz 7y ago
      I've had a similarly good low-maintenance and dependable upgrade experience with CentOS
      - Scramblejams 7y ago
        CentOS ain't gonna get me away from systemd, though.
  - nailer 7y ago
    > I haven’t written an init script in ten years. Me neither, but that's because of systemd. How do you make your own SysV service without making an init script?
- johnr2 7y ago
  >Not everyone likes writing shell scripts to start services Sure, but that isn't a good reason to remove the option to do so for everyone else. I've been using Linux for 20+ years but the apparent shift from "stable and reliable" to "new and shiny" concerns me. The feeling of being an involuntary beta tester is not a good one.
  - rkangel 7y ago
    > that isn't a good reason to remove the option to do so for everyone else It really is. Accepting the status quo and abandoning progress is how software systems become stagnant and die. X is a bloated protocol, designed for a different age of computers. Sys V is an archaic system that makes the task of having a standard daemon run in a standard way surprisingly difficult (and also prevents parallelising startup). I'm not saying the replacements are perfect, but at least we're trying. Maintaining perfect backwards compatibility would have an effect on progress somewhere between 'making it harder' and 'making it impossible'. Not that backwards compatibility should be completely abandoned. See XWayland, and also the fact that SystemD does still execute init.d shell scripts.
    - zzzcpan 7y ago
      Every new piece of software is not progress, very little of it is actually innovative, none is better in every way and not that much of it is even usable. Having options at least accepts that, respects people's time and allows people to avoid suffering through it until it eventually dies anyway. Speaking of stagnation, reinventing anything "not invented here" is also stagnation, not progress.
    - tempguy9999 7y ago
      > and abandoning progress Change is not, itself alone, progress. Progress can be a lack of change, if that change was regression in functionality, q.v. the large and growing number of shitty interfaces. And by interface I mean everything from boeing's mistake right down to the controls on a fan heater of mine. I guess I need to explain the latter. I've had a period of joint pain in my hands due to a developing food intolerance (now under control). The fan heater control was a dial, partly flanged for grip. But just a fucking little flange, so as not to stick out too much. Trying to operate that with your digits hurting was a bitch. It would have been literally unusable for someone with strength loss from advanced age and some decent arthritis on top. Interfaces are a very broad category in my view, and we have far too many bad ones. Anyway, sorry for the rant, but don't confuse change with better.
DonHopkins 7y ago
And for good reason! It's about time, too. The "Unix Philosophy" is intellectually bankrupt. You shouldn't have to fork a process from the shell to multiply two floating point numbers (especially when the CPU can do that in one instruction), or do simple string manipulation. That's ridiculous.
- 1_player 7y ago
  Not sure I agree with you there: should it not fork a process to run a heavy task? Should it not fork a process for each end of a pipe, especially considering we're deep into the multicore era of processors? The fact that the basic shell could use more builtins instead of delegating everything to external processes (like calculating a simple expression) is totally unrelated to the Unix Philosophy being bankrupt. If fork and processes weren't so expensive, I still think multiple processes are the best way to parallelise on multicore CPUs. In fact, there's a resurgence in programming environments based on multiple communicating, yet isolated, processes, see Erlang/Elixir. Though I definitely would like to see someone seriously exploring a different paradigm than UNIX. EDIT: Unix philosophy also is "everything is a file", and what is a file exactly? A bag of bytes. Everything we deal with is a bag of bytes if you think about it, so I find it perfectly fitting to model our world that way. But then again, the current construct to represent this idea such as labels organised in directories, might be a bit long in the tooth and we're due for some paradigm shift on this front as well, but I digress.
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    So you propose making a "floating point multiply server", even though the CPU can do that in one instruction? Talk about microservices!
    - 1_player 7y ago
      Au contraire, I'm saying the shell could turn your multiplication command into a single instruction, no need to call an external process. But at some point you need to delegate to other processes. You can't have /bin/bash embed your Chrome browser in it. But that's not even Unix philosophy. That's how DOS used to work as well.
cp9 7y ago
linux is healthier than it's ever been. even microsoft is in on linux now
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  Considering the state of current Windows I'm not sure that's actually an endorsement.
  - organsnyder 7y ago
    Care to unpack that? Windows 10 is the first Windows OS I've felt comfortable using since Windows 2000.
    - McAtNite 7y ago
      Out of curiosity what do you prefer in it when compared to Win7? For me Windows 10 has been a huge step backwards. Settings are spread out in multiple UWP style apps and the classic settings programs. The update scheme is annoying, and Microsoft is pushing out more buggy updates than ever before. Clicking “check for updates” surprise enrolls you into their beta channel. The telemetry is forced and they regularly reset your preferences. I absolutely hate Win10, and this is coming from a guy who didn’t mind Win8.
      - organsnyder 7y ago
        To be honest, I didn't seriously use Win7 much, so I probably agree with everything you said. I've used 10 a lot more (switched to a Windows-centric company and finally built a gaming rig at home). So maybe I would have liked 7 as well. I do find the settings to be confusing—I assume they're mid-transition on those. I have also yet to be bitten by a bad update. I'm sure my time will come.
        alpaca128 7y ago
        In my experience Windows 7 was clearly the pinnacle so far. The only real new feature since then that I liked was the ability to scroll in windows that aren't in the foreground. In exchange the privacy and update issues basically exploded with Windows 10, to a point where the frequency of my system reinstallations went from "maybe once in the lifetime of the PC" to "about every 6 months". It's the main cause for my full switch to Linux and the number of reasons to not go back is only growing over time.
nixpulvis 7y ago
What kind of garbage is this. The Unix philosophy is not about any of this. In fact X.org is an example of software running on a UNIX environment that really doesn't embrace the philosophy. It's not small, and it doesn't really do a minimal task well and compose them. It's a monolithic interface, and it works because it's been around for a long time. OpenGL or DirectX are other examples of interfaces that aren't really UNIX like. In comes Wayland, with solutions to many outstanding issues, and design decisions. But it's new, bleeding new still. When I think about UNIX philosophy I think of `ps -ef | rg fire | cut -d ' ' -f 2 | sort | sed '/^$/d'`, and the push towards micro kernels and stuff like that.
- cheez 7y ago
  Seriously. X11 is not at all in the UNIX philosophy. Conceptually, it is. But not implementation wise.
- atoav 7y ago
  The question is how would you get a (consistent) GUI without some sort of "bigger" system. Maybe a modular structure?
  - zzzcpan 7y ago
    Consistent GUIs is the problem of enforcing guidelines, not software problem, implementation details are irrelevant.
  - nixpulvis 7y ago
    My favorite "GUI" is just text. The shell interface is, for me, the best [1]. It's very rarely ambiguous, and it works well for many people, even people without vision. [1] https://nixpulvis.com/ramblings/2018-07-11-building-a-shell-part-1 https://nixpulvis.com/ramblings/2018-07-11-building-a-shell-... [1b] https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/without-gui-how-live-entirely-terminal https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/without-gui-how-live-en... (also on the front page right now).
- dang 7y ago
  > What kind of garbage is this. Please edit such name-calling out of your comments here, as the site guidelines ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Your comment would be just fine without that bit.

by archy_ 7y ago

jamespo 7y ago

Not everyone likes writing shell scripts to start services

nisa 7y ago
Not everyone wants to talk dbus to configure the firewall :P
- pas 7y ago
  I just put iptables shit into /etc/rc.local and it works, no dbus needed :)
  - nisa 7y ago
    this was just a stupid comment on firewalld
hedora 7y ago
I haven’t written an init script in ten years. It is like coming home one day, and the house has been demolished. There’s a joker in a bulldozer proudly proclaiming there was some dog crap on the sidewalk, and that he took care of it for me.
- Scramblejams 7y ago
  Solid analogy. In the case of Systemd, it was fixing problems for me that I never had, and creating problems that I'd also never had: It broke laptop sleep. It broke /etc/rc.local. It broke domainless local DNS lookups. It broke boot on one of my servers (fstab's new nofail argument? really?) And it (soft) broke a keyboard of mine. A keyboard! Astonishing. I really wish Debian had not drunk that particular kool-aid. :'( I'd go somewhere else but Debian (and by extension Ubuntu) have been doing binary package management the longest, and for me it really shows. I want these boxes to just sit there for years, be extremely low maintenance and only pick up security updates, and I've never gotten a better experience anywhere else.
  - hrangozz 7y ago
    I've had a similarly good low-maintenance and dependable upgrade experience with CentOS
    - Scramblejams 7y ago
      CentOS ain't gonna get me away from systemd, though.
- nailer 7y ago
  > I haven’t written an init script in ten years. Me neither, but that's because of systemd. How do you make your own SysV service without making an init script?
johnr2 7y ago
>Not everyone likes writing shell scripts to start services Sure, but that isn't a good reason to remove the option to do so for everyone else. I've been using Linux for 20+ years but the apparent shift from "stable and reliable" to "new and shiny" concerns me. The feeling of being an involuntary beta tester is not a good one.
- rkangel 7y ago
  > that isn't a good reason to remove the option to do so for everyone else It really is. Accepting the status quo and abandoning progress is how software systems become stagnant and die. X is a bloated protocol, designed for a different age of computers. Sys V is an archaic system that makes the task of having a standard daemon run in a standard way surprisingly difficult (and also prevents parallelising startup). I'm not saying the replacements are perfect, but at least we're trying. Maintaining perfect backwards compatibility would have an effect on progress somewhere between 'making it harder' and 'making it impossible'. Not that backwards compatibility should be completely abandoned. See XWayland, and also the fact that SystemD does still execute init.d shell scripts.
  - zzzcpan 7y ago
    Every new piece of software is not progress, very little of it is actually innovative, none is better in every way and not that much of it is even usable. Having options at least accepts that, respects people's time and allows people to avoid suffering through it until it eventually dies anyway. Speaking of stagnation, reinventing anything "not invented here" is also stagnation, not progress.
  - tempguy9999 7y ago
    > and abandoning progress Change is not, itself alone, progress. Progress can be a lack of change, if that change was regression in functionality, q.v. the large and growing number of shitty interfaces. And by interface I mean everything from boeing's mistake right down to the controls on a fan heater of mine. I guess I need to explain the latter. I've had a period of joint pain in my hands due to a developing food intolerance (now under control). The fan heater control was a dial, partly flanged for grip. But just a fucking little flange, so as not to stick out too much. Trying to operate that with your digits hurting was a bitch. It would have been literally unusable for someone with strength loss from advanced age and some decent arthritis on top. Interfaces are a very broad category in my view, and we have far too many bad ones. Anyway, sorry for the rant, but don't confuse change with better.

DonHopkins 7y ago

And for good reason! It's about time, too. The "Unix Philosophy" is intellectually bankrupt. You shouldn't have to fork a process from the shell to multiply two floating point numbers (especially when the CPU can do that in one instruction), or do simple string manipulation. That's ridiculous.

1_player 7y ago
Not sure I agree with you there: should it not fork a process to run a heavy task? Should it not fork a process for each end of a pipe, especially considering we're deep into the multicore era of processors? The fact that the basic shell could use more builtins instead of delegating everything to external processes (like calculating a simple expression) is totally unrelated to the Unix Philosophy being bankrupt. If fork and processes weren't so expensive, I still think multiple processes are the best way to parallelise on multicore CPUs. In fact, there's a resurgence in programming environments based on multiple communicating, yet isolated, processes, see Erlang/Elixir. Though I definitely would like to see someone seriously exploring a different paradigm than UNIX. EDIT: Unix philosophy also is "everything is a file", and what is a file exactly? A bag of bytes. Everything we deal with is a bag of bytes if you think about it, so I find it perfectly fitting to model our world that way. But then again, the current construct to represent this idea such as labels organised in directories, might be a bit long in the tooth and we're due for some paradigm shift on this front as well, but I digress.
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  So you propose making a "floating point multiply server", even though the CPU can do that in one instruction? Talk about microservices!
  - 1_player 7y ago
    Au contraire, I'm saying the shell could turn your multiplication command into a single instruction, no need to call an external process. But at some point you need to delegate to other processes. You can't have /bin/bash embed your Chrome browser in it. But that's not even Unix philosophy. That's how DOS used to work as well.

cp9 7y ago

linux is healthier than it's ever been. even microsoft is in on linux now

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
Considering the state of current Windows I'm not sure that's actually an endorsement.
- organsnyder 7y ago
  Care to unpack that? Windows 10 is the first Windows OS I've felt comfortable using since Windows 2000.
  - McAtNite 7y ago
    Out of curiosity what do you prefer in it when compared to Win7? For me Windows 10 has been a huge step backwards. Settings are spread out in multiple UWP style apps and the classic settings programs. The update scheme is annoying, and Microsoft is pushing out more buggy updates than ever before. Clicking “check for updates” surprise enrolls you into their beta channel. The telemetry is forced and they regularly reset your preferences. I absolutely hate Win10, and this is coming from a guy who didn’t mind Win8.
    - organsnyder 7y ago
      To be honest, I didn't seriously use Win7 much, so I probably agree with everything you said. I've used 10 a lot more (switched to a Windows-centric company and finally built a gaming rig at home). So maybe I would have liked 7 as well. I do find the settings to be confusing—I assume they're mid-transition on those. I have also yet to be bitten by a bad update. I'm sure my time will come.
      - alpaca128 7y ago
        In my experience Windows 7 was clearly the pinnacle so far. The only real new feature since then that I liked was the ability to scroll in windows that aren't in the foreground. In exchange the privacy and update issues basically exploded with Windows 10, to a point where the frequency of my system reinstallations went from "maybe once in the lifetime of the PC" to "about every 6 months". It's the main cause for my full switch to Linux and the number of reasons to not go back is only growing over time.

nixpulvis 7y ago

What kind of garbage is this. The Unix philosophy is not about any of this. In fact X.org is an example of software running on a UNIX environment that really doesn't embrace the philosophy. It's not small, and it doesn't really do a minimal task well and compose them. It's a monolithic interface, and it works because it's been around for a long time. OpenGL or DirectX are other examples of interfaces that aren't really UNIX like. In comes Wayland, with solutions to many outstanding issues, and design decisions. But it's new, bleeding new still. When I think about UNIX philosophy I think of `ps -ef | rg fire | cut -d ' ' -f 2 | sort | sed '/^$/d'`, and the push towards micro kernels and stuff like that.

cheez 7y ago
Seriously. X11 is not at all in the UNIX philosophy. Conceptually, it is. But not implementation wise.
atoav 7y ago
The question is how would you get a (consistent) GUI without some sort of "bigger" system. Maybe a modular structure?
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  Consistent GUIs is the problem of enforcing guidelines, not software problem, implementation details are irrelevant.
- nixpulvis 7y ago
  My favorite "GUI" is just text. The shell interface is, for me, the best [1]. It's very rarely ambiguous, and it works well for many people, even people without vision. [1] https://nixpulvis.com/ramblings/2018-07-11-building-a-shell-part-1 https://nixpulvis.com/ramblings/2018-07-11-building-a-shell-... [1b] https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/without-gui-how-live-entirely-terminal https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/without-gui-how-live-en... (also on the front page right now).
dang 7y ago
> What kind of garbage is this. Please edit such name-calling out of your comments here, as the site guidelines ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Your comment would be just fine without that bit.