4 ms·

> no native graphics, which is why today the X11 graphics system is being removed and replaced with a new one, Wayland. I'm not disagreeing with your general p

> no native graphics, which is why today the X11 graphics system is being removed and replaced with a new one, Wayland. I'm not disagreeing with your general points, just being pedantic about the "time bits". Wayland has been the default for even enterprise distros since 2019, and Wayland was created in 2008, so not new, but newer than X11.

lproven 1mo ago
All right. I write and have written a bit about enterprise distros, but because all 3 of the main vendors are just remarkably unhelpful -- I think more from sheer incompetence than malice -- I do not look at them much. It is not very germane to what I do: no competent finance director would base their choice of enterprise OS on reviews in the Register. :-) I don't know enough to even dispute the timing, so I will let it go. But the core point here is that Linux has no kernel-integrated GUI, so it is possible to rip and replace it. Whereas in the comments on my obit for Dr Tim King... https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/08/18/tim-king-amigados-royalty-dies-aged-70/5289101 https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/08/18/tim-king-ami... ... there are people discussing how it was impossible to completely disable the GUI in AmigaOS 1... it fired up with a CLI in a window because the windowing system is in the ROM. King used it to replace terminal sessions in TRIPOS, if I understand it correctly. (I was using a Sinclair ZX Spectrum back then myself, and after a while on an Amstrad PCW, moved to an Acorn Archimedes. When AmigaOS 1.x was current, an Amiga cost as much as a small car in the UK, and I had just gone to university and could not afford a bicycle let alone a car.) Although they were written by different teams, you could no more disable the Amiga's GUI than you could boot a Mac Plus into text mode: it didn't have a text mode to boot into. The GUI was an integral core part of the OS. AmigaOS was better structured, with kernel, multitasking layer, and GUI layer... but they were still one inextricable whole. This is the reverse of Unix, including Linux, which is a 1960s minicomputer OS design. Its inextricable core concepts are dumb terminals on serial ports, and a filesystem, and it barely has any built in idea of "networking" or "a GUI" -- they are bolted on extras that came a decade or 2 later. You can boot any Linux into single-user mode with no networking and no GUI.
- yencabulator 1mo ago
  Modern PCs no longer have a text mode. It's just a pixel-based framebuffer and a bitmap font in firmware. Machines built before 2020 had an emulation layer that intercepted writes to a "text console" and had the firmware render pixels to the framebuffer. Before that, that same emulation resided in the firmware running on the display device. Real text console has been dead since something like early 1990s. You can build Linux without ttys or serial ports. You can't disable VFS and a root fs (initramfs or noinitramfs, but either one is there), but Linux is surprisingly modular.
  - lproven 1mo ago
    Honestly, this is quibbling about implementation details, IMHO. You can put DOS on a USB key and boot basically any 21st century x86 box straight into DOS. I have a hobby project that does just that: https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos And yes, that includes UEFI boxes: https://github.com/CSMWrap/CSMWrap https://github.com/CSMWrap/CSMWrap (No, I have not tried this myself yet. I own very few UEFI-only machines. I personally have no use for it.)

lproven 1mo ago

All right. I write and have written a bit about enterprise distros, but because all 3 of the main vendors are just remarkably unhelpful -- I think more from sheer incompetence than malice -- I do not look at them much. It is not very germane to what I do: no competent finance director would base their choice of enterprise OS on reviews in the Register. :-) I don't know enough to even dispute the timing, so I will let it go. But the core point here is that Linux has no kernel-integrated GUI, so it is possible to rip and replace it. Whereas in the comments on my obit for Dr Tim King... https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/08/18/tim-king-amigados-royalty-dies-aged-70/5289101 https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/08/18/tim-king-ami... ... there are people discussing how it was impossible to completely disable the GUI in AmigaOS 1... it fired up with a CLI in a window because the windowing system is in the ROM. King used it to replace terminal sessions in TRIPOS, if I understand it correctly. (I was using a Sinclair ZX Spectrum back then myself, and after a while on an Amstrad PCW, moved to an Acorn Archimedes. When AmigaOS 1.x was current, an Amiga cost as much as a small car in the UK, and I had just gone to university and could not afford a bicycle let alone a car.) Although they were written by different teams, you could no more disable the Amiga's GUI than you could boot a Mac Plus into text mode: it didn't have a text mode to boot into. The GUI was an integral core part of the OS. AmigaOS was better structured, with kernel, multitasking layer, and GUI layer... but they were still one inextricable whole. This is the reverse of Unix, including Linux, which is a 1960s minicomputer OS design. Its inextricable core concepts are dumb terminals on serial ports, and a filesystem, and it barely has any built in idea of "networking" or "a GUI" -- they are bolted on extras that came a decade or 2 later. You can boot any Linux into single-user mode with no networking and no GUI.

yencabulator 1mo ago
Modern PCs no longer have a text mode. It's just a pixel-based framebuffer and a bitmap font in firmware. Machines built before 2020 had an emulation layer that intercepted writes to a "text console" and had the firmware render pixels to the framebuffer. Before that, that same emulation resided in the firmware running on the display device. Real text console has been dead since something like early 1990s. You can build Linux without ttys or serial ports. You can't disable VFS and a root fs (initramfs or noinitramfs, but either one is there), but Linux is surprisingly modular.
- lproven 1mo ago
  Honestly, this is quibbling about implementation details, IMHO. You can put DOS on a USB key and boot basically any 21st century x86 box straight into DOS. I have a hobby project that does just that: https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos And yes, that includes UEFI boxes: https://github.com/CSMWrap/CSMWrap https://github.com/CSMWrap/CSMWrap (No, I have not tried this myself yet. I own very few UEFI-only machines. I personally have no use for it.)