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"I think that if you took a Unix user from the early 1990s and dropped them into a 2022 Unix system via SSH, they wouldn't find much that was majorly different
by tyingq 4y ago
"I think that if you took a Unix user from the early 1990s and dropped them into a 2022 Unix system via SSH, they wouldn't find much that was majorly different in the experience."
I agree. In fact, since there's fewer actively used unix variants, the same job would seem simpler in many ways. I think the fragmentation of tech above the OS would be much more intimidating. So many more languages, build+deploy systems, frameworks, things like api gateways, caching platforms, load balancers, and so on. In the 1990's an admin could maintain a decent amount of personal knowledge about what a developer might be doing on the platform.
- semireg 4y agoIn my early 20s I was a Linux sysadmin contractor in the Midwest US and got dropped into a job site where the core team was being offshored. I had to quickly learn how to maintain HPUX, AIX and some Solaris boxes using docs in the form of word docs scattered across network drives. These old admins hated Linux… and I hated the unfamiliarity of the non-Linux systems. How could anyone live with a shell where tab completion wasn’t a feature? Gag!
- Cupertino95014 4y agoYou couldn't count on emacs being available on some random Unix system. Bad times, those were.
- seabrookmx 4y agoYou still can't.. many (most?) mainstream distros don't ship vim or emacs by default.
- ckolkey 4y agoEmacs, sure, but I've yet to find a distro without at least vim
- glandium 4y agoYou'll find smaller editors like nano or nvi installed by default more often than vim.
- sanxiyn 4y agoFedora made nano default in 2020: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/UseNanoByDefault https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/UseNanoByDefault
- HeckFeck 4y agoOh, you, IBM. I'm more of an $ apt remove --purge nano > /dev/null man myself.
- eddyfromtheblok 4y agothe bare minimum at one point was just ed(1), the line editor. vi (without the m) wasn't a guarantee. I had an all-purpose cshrc that added /usr/ucb because vi was installed there on some systems, along with other BSD programs
- ShredKazoo 4y agoWhat does /usr even mean?
- lproven 4y agoAs I understand it, historically, it was the tree for user home directories. The two main designers, `dmr` and `ken`, built tools in their home directories under there and shared stuff from there. Then they ran out of space and needed to spill over onto another drive, so home directories got moved to `/home`.
- WhyNotHugo 4y agoUnix Shared Resources, if I recall correctly.
- 4y ago
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y agoI feel the same way today when I can't tab complete parameter or variable names in typical unix shells.
- mannyv 4y agoAs someone who used to administer solaris, sunos, hpux, and aix boxes, i can almost guarantee that the first thing they'd say is "What the fuck is up with this systemd shit?" Because i say that all the time.
- sanxiyn 4y agosystemd was necessary. In fact, Solaris did it first in the form of SMF.
- wsc981 4y ago> systemd was necessary. In fact, Solaris did it first in the form of SMF. Apple's Unix variant seems fine without it though ... Of course macOS uses launchd [0] which I guess is somewhat similar. And if I am not mistaken it's released under a permissive license. Perhaps Linux could benefit from using launchd instead of systemd? --- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launchd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launchd
- sanxiyn 4y agomacOS includes launchd, because it is in fact necessary.
- robertlagrant 4y agoThis doesn't make sense to me, twice: 1) the presence of launchd doesn't make systemd necessary 2) the previous absence of anything like systemd on Linux distros means I don't know what you mean by "necessary"
- patrakov 4y ago> Of course macOS uses launchd [0] which I guess is somewhat similar. It isn't. Systemd has dependencies and many directives to express them. Launchd doesn't, and instead demands that every service either waits for its dependencies by itself or crashes deliberately if they are not met - so the autorestart by means of its brute force eventually brings the system fully up.
- jameshart 4y agoUNIX is fundamentally dedicated to the proposition that there is nothing that you can or could wish to do on a multicore 64 bit ARM system with a massively parallel GPU subsystem with its own memory, solid state disks and a fibernet backbone, that fundamentally differs from a PDP11 with a teletype and some magnetic tape drives attached to it. It's not entirely clear whether that proposition's actually true. I think in particular when you look at things like the ability of that operating system abstraction to handle stuff like GPU accelerated computation (CUDA and the like) it's possible that the insistence that the only abstractions we need are processes, pipes, sockets and inodes starts feeling a little limiting.
- pjmlp 4y agoUnless that UNIX happens to be Irix or NeXTSTEP/macOS, with their own view of the world beyond their UNIX roots. UNIX/POSIX never went beyond the basic of CLI applications and server daemons.
- netrap 4y agoOnly to be deeply confused when ifconfig is missing...