14 ms·

The return of the Unix wars?

23 points by sciurus 15y ago

debacle 15y ago
> But that fragmentation did not happen. Lots of distributions exist, but they have all followed roughly the same course and, for the most part, do not differ by all that much. From an end user's standpoint, this is completely untrue. Just look at the various package management software and philosophies across all of the distros. It's a mire.
- excuse-me 15y ago
  But you can get the same software on all of them. Gimp might come from different per-distribution repositories, there may be a different command line app to grab it, but it's there. In the old days you had Autocad for Sun but not for HP. The 3D modelling package ran on SGI but not on Sun. And our microwave antennea simulation package was only on HP. We literally had 3 different brands of Unix workstations in a lab, with different unixes dedicated to running a single app. At least with X you could run any of them on your own desktop seamlessly.
  - debacle 15y ago
    It's there, but it's a different version, and getting the version you want (if it's the latest version) still requires you to whip out gcc most likely, unless someone on the Internet has already done the work for you.
    - jamesgeck0 15y ago
      Unless you use relatively unpopular software, or you want updates the same day a new version comes out, chances are that someone has probably already done the work for you.
      - debacle 15y ago
        Maybe for debian, but when I tried updating PHP for PHP5.3 it was impossible to find a CentOS package, even a year after PHP5.3 was out. We had to roll our own, which was fine, but the average end user (or the programmer wearing the sysadmin hat) doesn't have the capability to do that.
        tedsuo 15y ago
        If your distro can't (or won't) keep up with a mainstream package like php, and you need it to, maybe it's time to switch? Which is easy, because all of your software will run on whatever flavor you switch to. The ability to easily jump ship like that is what makes it "not fragmented."
        jamesgeck0 15y ago
        Oh, yeah. I forgot about CentOS. Distributions targeted at enterprise are harder; I use a third party repo for Asterisk and FreePBX, but I think I did have to compile a few dependencies.
tosseraccount 15y ago
The big Unix war is Apple's BSD/Darwin vs Linux. Can linux exploit its foothold on the desktop? Can Apple subsidize it's way into the server room?
- debacle 15y ago
  Does Apple want to be in the server room? Can Apple make money in the server room? I think the answer to both of those questions is probably no.
  - sp332 15y ago
    Apple made a serious bid in the server space before, but it seems dead now. Remember the Xserve? http://www.bioinformatics.colostate.edu/hardware.html http://www.bioinformatics.colostate.edu/hardware.html
    - sophacles 15y ago
      My understanding of Xserve was that it was less "server space" and more back-office. I know the back office runs on servers, but server-space makes me think of racks of machines in a big server room or data center. I always felt Xserve was just targeting small offices (design companies and the like) that were already apple shops, rather than serious "grown up" servers.
      - sp332 15y ago
        You may be right in general, but I remember they made a big deal about large server clusters and big-iron, bioinformatics stuff for a while.
- elsurudo 15y ago
  I don't know about that. Looking at Lion Server, it's like they're barely trying on the server front. I don't think it's a measurable part of their current strategy...
- 286c8cb04bda 15y ago
exDM69 15y ago
tl;dr: Long rant about Android internals. I work with them. Quote: "The notable exception, of course, is Android, but that may well be the exception that proves the rule: only a company with the financial resources of Google can hope to take on responsibility for that much code and hope to maintain it over the long term." If you start studying (or working with) the internals deep enough, you'll find out that Android is full of stupid technical decisions which cannot be sustainable in the long run. Having a Google-sized budget helps but there are some really weak links in there. I'll give two examples: the first one is Android's C library, Bionic. It seems like Android wanted to avoid using GNU libc just to avoid the need for having to upstream local changes due to GPL licensing in glibc. So they went ahead and wrote a friggin' C library, arguably the most peripheral and boring of all the software components in an operating system. And also one that's quite laborious to put together and maintain. It takes special character to do that. Ask Ulrich Drepper. You may argue that Android doesn't need all of glibc or that Bionic does it's job. From a customer perspective that may be true, but a customer does not see the libc anyway. But in reality, there's lots of hard work going on every day to ship products with Bionic. I've been watching that happen a lot recently. A lot of these issues seem to be related to threading and C++ ABI issues. The issues that glibc was struggling with 15 years ago. Another bad example is Android's 2d graphics library, Skia. It is the reason why Android home screen looks so crappy slow compared to certain competing products. It has a similar API to a lot of graphics packages that were popular in the 1990's. It includes bitmap blitters and so on. They have some optimizations to use NEON SIMD instructions, but it's inherently a software (CPU) graphics lib. The synchronous API offers no opportunity for hardware acceleration. I am under the impression that Skia would be going away from Android and that's a good thing. I promised two examples, but I'll give one for a bonus: Android's proprietary interprocess communication mechanism that's implemented in the kernel (can't remember it's name). It was designed to avoid a memcpy call when passing stuff from one process to another. That was a reasonable solution with slow uniprocessor computers of early 2000's but that ship has sailed. These days this kind of things are better done in the user space, like Dbus, which is used by most desktop (and some mobile) linux distros. Whoa, what a rant. But it only tells one thing: I'd much rather work with a GNU/Linux system than an Android one.
- tosseraccount 15y ago
papsosouid 15y ago
It isn't a war when they are all open source. And the differentiation between linux distros isn't new, and doesn't matter. All decent unix software works on a bunch of linux distros of various ages, plus half a dozen BSDs, solaris and OSX. Ubuntu not using systemd doesn't matter at all.
Apocryphon 15y ago
Perhaps it's time to check out Haiku?
- debacle 15y ago
  Is Haiku production ready? How long before it even moves to beta?
  - drzaiusapelord 15y ago
    by looking at their roadmap: http://dev.haiku-os.org/roadmap http://dev.haiku-os.org/roadmap Its either tomorrow or never. I don't think its a fast moving project.
ChuckMcM 15y ago
Interesting rant. Having lived through the first Unix wars I can say with some certainty that the Gnome/KDE/... UI debates often echoed the NeWS/X/Motif/CDE debates. The streams/sockets debate or the Kthread/Events debates, same old same old. As I've gotten more experienced I have come to appreciate how much some folks care and how little others in the same space do. Makes for an interesting path. Looking at Linux distros I can easily see folks committing stuff who think Windows 'did it right', the same with folks who felt OSX 'did it right', and yes folks who felt that SunOS/IRIX/Ultrix/What have you 'did it right.' All that really tells you is that there are several right ways. Perhaps most telling is to watch arguments where the parties are arguing from two different places and talking right past each other. The result however, in a FOSS world, is you get to see all of these visions of what is 'right.' But its not so much a war as it is a sort of dysfunctional anarchy. In the article, the author notes, but doesn't call out, the difference between a Linux distro and Android, or Tizen, or WebOS, is that the former often has a group of equal committers and the latter has a person/organization that is driving to a particular vision/goal. So while one can rant about how Android sucks as a desktop OS, or Ubuntu sucks as a Phone OS it doesn't really inform the conversation much. I believe that we will see the emergence of a 'read-only' FOSS project, in the sense that it gains traction, is 'open' in the sense that you can get the code and all, but the leader doesn't allow any outside changes. Android and Chrome both have some of this feel.

23 points by sciurus 15y ago

> But that fragmentation did not happen. Lots of distributions exist, but they have all followed roughly the same course and, for the most part, do not differ by all that much. From an end user's standpoint, this is completely untrue. Just look at the various package management software and philosophies across all of the distros. It's a mire.

excuse-me 15y ago
But you can get the same software on all of them. Gimp might come from different per-distribution repositories, there may be a different command line app to grab it, but it's there. In the old days you had Autocad for Sun but not for HP. The 3D modelling package ran on SGI but not on Sun. And our microwave antennea simulation package was only on HP. We literally had 3 different brands of Unix workstations in a lab, with different unixes dedicated to running a single app. At least with X you could run any of them on your own desktop seamlessly.
- debacle 15y ago
  It's there, but it's a different version, and getting the version you want (if it's the latest version) still requires you to whip out gcc most likely, unless someone on the Internet has already done the work for you.
  - jamesgeck0 15y ago
    Unless you use relatively unpopular software, or you want updates the same day a new version comes out, chances are that someone has probably already done the work for you.
    - debacle 15y ago
      Maybe for debian, but when I tried updating PHP for PHP5.3 it was impossible to find a CentOS package, even a year after PHP5.3 was out. We had to roll our own, which was fine, but the average end user (or the programmer wearing the sysadmin hat) doesn't have the capability to do that.
      - tedsuo 15y ago
        If your distro can't (or won't) keep up with a mainstream package like php, and you need it to, maybe it's time to switch? Which is easy, because all of your software will run on whatever flavor you switch to. The ability to easily jump ship like that is what makes it "not fragmented."
      - jamesgeck0 15y ago
        Oh, yeah. I forgot about CentOS. Distributions targeted at enterprise are harder; I use a third party repo for Asterisk and FreePBX, but I think I did have to compile a few dependencies.

tosseraccount 15y ago

The big Unix war is Apple's BSD/Darwin vs Linux. Can linux exploit its foothold on the desktop? Can Apple subsidize it's way into the server room?

debacle 15y ago
Does Apple want to be in the server room? Can Apple make money in the server room? I think the answer to both of those questions is probably no.
- sp332 15y ago
  Apple made a serious bid in the server space before, but it seems dead now. Remember the Xserve? http://www.bioinformatics.colostate.edu/hardware.html http://www.bioinformatics.colostate.edu/hardware.html
  - sophacles 15y ago
    My understanding of Xserve was that it was less "server space" and more back-office. I know the back office runs on servers, but server-space makes me think of racks of machines in a big server room or data center. I always felt Xserve was just targeting small offices (design companies and the like) that were already apple shops, rather than serious "grown up" servers.
    - sp332 15y ago
      You may be right in general, but I remember they made a big deal about large server clusters and big-iron, bioinformatics stuff for a while.
elsurudo 15y ago
I don't know about that. Looking at Lion Server, it's like they're barely trying on the server front. I don't think it's a measurable part of their current strategy...
286c8cb04bda 15y ago

exDM69 15y ago

tl;dr: Long rant about Android internals. I work with them. Quote: "The notable exception, of course, is Android, but that may well be the exception that proves the rule: only a company with the financial resources of Google can hope to take on responsibility for that much code and hope to maintain it over the long term." If you start studying (or working with) the internals deep enough, you'll find out that Android is full of stupid technical decisions which cannot be sustainable in the long run. Having a Google-sized budget helps but there are some really weak links in there. I'll give two examples: the first one is Android's C library, Bionic. It seems like Android wanted to avoid using GNU libc just to avoid the need for having to upstream local changes due to GPL licensing in glibc. So they went ahead and wrote a friggin' C library, arguably the most peripheral and boring of all the software components in an operating system. And also one that's quite laborious to put together and maintain. It takes special character to do that. Ask Ulrich Drepper. You may argue that Android doesn't need all of glibc or that Bionic does it's job. From a customer perspective that may be true, but a customer does not see the libc anyway. But in reality, there's lots of hard work going on every day to ship products with Bionic. I've been watching that happen a lot recently. A lot of these issues seem to be related to threading and C++ ABI issues. The issues that glibc was struggling with 15 years ago. Another bad example is Android's 2d graphics library, Skia. It is the reason why Android home screen looks so crappy slow compared to certain competing products. It has a similar API to a lot of graphics packages that were popular in the 1990's. It includes bitmap blitters and so on. They have some optimizations to use NEON SIMD instructions, but it's inherently a software (CPU) graphics lib. The synchronous API offers no opportunity for hardware acceleration. I am under the impression that Skia would be going away from Android and that's a good thing. I promised two examples, but I'll give one for a bonus: Android's proprietary interprocess communication mechanism that's implemented in the kernel (can't remember it's name). It was designed to avoid a memcpy call when passing stuff from one process to another. That was a reasonable solution with slow uniprocessor computers of early 2000's but that ship has sailed. These days this kind of things are better done in the user space, like Dbus, which is used by most desktop (and some mobile) linux distros. Whoa, what a rant. But it only tells one thing: I'd much rather work with a GNU/Linux system than an Android one.

tosseraccount 15y ago

papsosouid 15y ago

It isn't a war when they are all open source. And the differentiation between linux distros isn't new, and doesn't matter. All decent unix software works on a bunch of linux distros of various ages, plus half a dozen BSDs, solaris and OSX. Ubuntu not using systemd doesn't matter at all.

Apocryphon 15y ago

Perhaps it's time to check out Haiku?

debacle 15y ago
Is Haiku production ready? How long before it even moves to beta?
- drzaiusapelord 15y ago
  by looking at their roadmap: http://dev.haiku-os.org/roadmap http://dev.haiku-os.org/roadmap Its either tomorrow or never. I don't think its a fast moving project.

ChuckMcM 15y ago

Interesting rant. Having lived through the first Unix wars I can say with some certainty that the Gnome/KDE/... UI debates often echoed the NeWS/X/Motif/CDE debates. The streams/sockets debate or the Kthread/Events debates, same old same old. As I've gotten more experienced I have come to appreciate how much some folks care and how little others in the same space do. Makes for an interesting path. Looking at Linux distros I can easily see folks committing stuff who think Windows 'did it right', the same with folks who felt OSX 'did it right', and yes folks who felt that SunOS/IRIX/Ultrix/What have you 'did it right.' All that really tells you is that there are several right ways. Perhaps most telling is to watch arguments where the parties are arguing from two different places and talking right past each other. The result however, in a FOSS world, is you get to see all of these visions of what is 'right.' But its not so much a war as it is a sort of dysfunctional anarchy. In the article, the author notes, but doesn't call out, the difference between a Linux distro and Android, or Tizen, or WebOS, is that the former often has a group of equal committers and the latter has a person/organization that is driving to a particular vision/goal. So while one can rant about how Android sucks as a desktop OS, or Ubuntu sucks as a Phone OS it doesn't really inform the conversation much. I believe that we will see the emergence of a 'read-only' FOSS project, in the sense that it gains traction, is 'open' in the sense that you can get the code and all, but the leader doesn't allow any outside changes. Android and Chrome both have some of this feel.