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Most of those things really aren't part of the OS as such, they're just applications. Command line tools and UIs for example. They're just utilities, they don't

by simonh 4y ago

Most of those things really aren't part of the OS as such, they're just applications. Command line tools and UIs for example. They're just utilities, they don't matter at the level we're talking about here, about the operating system as a platform for developing and running software. You're complaining about the software people run on it, not the base layer of the OS itself. This is what I'm trying to point out, too many other OS projects rolled abstracted services into the base layer of the OS in order to make things easier to develop applications. That was a mistake because it tied them to particular implementations of those services.

lproven 4y ago
I disagree. In fact I'd go so far as to say that none of those things are applications. But one of the problems of discussions about concepts and philosophies in computing, I find, is that people are very wedded to their ideas and will eagerly redefine them on the fly in an attempt to defend them. So, for instance, I think that a fairly useful example of what counts as "part of the OS" today would be, for instance, what comes along with the OS on its installation medium. And to dodge questions of who-wrote-what, let's say that as an example let us talk about, say, FreeBSD or OpenBSD. They are the products of single teams of people, unlike any Linux distro. I installed FreeBSD as recently as yesterday, as research for this article: https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/20/freebsd_131/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/20/freebsd_131/ And as the piece mentions, OpenBSD in April, for this one: https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/22/openbsd_71_released_including_apple/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/22/openbsd_71_released_i... So they are recent, they are current versions, and can reasonably be described as two of the most complete modern versions of UNIX that are the products of single teams. Excluding Firefox, for example, as being manifestly an external component, albeit a FOSS one that can be installed directly from either OS's repos. Both come with an X.11 server as a standard OS component. That is not an application. Both offer Xfce as a standard desktop. That too is not an application. An X server is every bit as much an OS component of 21st century UNIX as is `awk` or `sed`. It is not 1974. We are not using PDP-11s any more. Tell me, can you pipe things to an X server? Can you usefully pipe its output to another program? I don't think that you can. And that, I submit, blows clean out of the water all the high-minded stuff about the conceptual purity of UNIX.

by simonh 4y ago

lproven 4y ago

I disagree. In fact I'd go so far as to say that none of those things are applications. But one of the problems of discussions about concepts and philosophies in computing, I find, is that people are very wedded to their ideas and will eagerly redefine them on the fly in an attempt to defend them. So, for instance, I think that a fairly useful example of what counts as "part of the OS" today would be, for instance, what comes along with the OS on its installation medium. And to dodge questions of who-wrote-what, let's say that as an example let us talk about, say, FreeBSD or OpenBSD. They are the products of single teams of people, unlike any Linux distro. I installed FreeBSD as recently as yesterday, as research for this article: https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/20/freebsd_131/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/20/freebsd_131/ And as the piece mentions, OpenBSD in April, for this one: https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/22/openbsd_71_released_including_apple/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/22/openbsd_71_released_i... So they are recent, they are current versions, and can reasonably be described as two of the most complete modern versions of UNIX that are the products of single teams. Excluding Firefox, for example, as being manifestly an external component, albeit a FOSS one that can be installed directly from either OS's repos. Both come with an X.11 server as a standard OS component. That is not an application. Both offer Xfce as a standard desktop. That too is not an application. An X server is every bit as much an OS component of 21st century UNIX as is `awk` or `sed`. It is not 1974. We are not using PDP-11s any more. Tell me, can you pipe things to an X server? Can you usefully pipe its output to another program? I don't think that you can. And that, I submit, blows clean out of the water all the high-minded stuff about the conceptual purity of UNIX.