Don't know that I buy that argument. Yes there are increasing levels of abstractions, and no its not always clean; but the world changes and its useful to look

Don't know that I buy that argument. Yes there are increasing levels of abstractions, and no its not always clean; but the world changes and its useful to look at different types of abstractions. Linux provides a "playground" for trying out abstractions, seeing what works and what doesn't -- and the stuff that doesn't work does tend to get factored out over time. For example dbus: I've used it in embedded environments (no bearing at all on "user friendliness") because it facilitates a "new, easier" programming paradigm that is lots of work to achieve otherwise, and this happens to have huge advantages in eg modularity, maintainability, etc for the application domain. Yes we could choose to do everything using a traditional "pure" unix file-type approach; but why should we not have the opportunity of trying out more "modern" abstractions, building apps & systems on them and seeing how they play out in the real world?