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He's talking about UNIX, not Linux, and he's 100% right. Look at the BSDs some time, or the Solaris forks. The disconnect between the Linux kernel and basic us

by jdub 12y ago

He's talking about UNIX, not Linux, and he's 100% right. Look at the BSDs some time, or the Solaris forks. The disconnect between the Linux kernel and basic userland has been a criticism of UNIX traditionalists for years. It's part of the reason why BSD has a few forks and Linux has hundreds of distributions.

bhaak 12y ago
I'm very well aware of the difference of Unix and Linux. I even smiled slighty as he also could just have claimed Linux to not be Unix and that would have been undisputable. I actually don't know what you mean with "criticism of UNIX traditionalists for years" in regards to the Linux kernel and the userland. I know of Linus' disregard of POSIX where it's crappy or doesn't make any sense anymore in his opinion but that can't extend to the userland as Linus doesn't do userland. Some clarification or links to said criticism would be welcome.
- elwin 12y ago
  > I actually don't know what you mean with "criticism of UNIX traditionalists for years" in regards to the Linux kernel and the userland. There's a joke from the 90's that goes something like "FreeBSD is what you get when Unix hackers write a Unix clone for the PC. Linux is what you get when PC hackers write a Unix clone for the PC." From the point of view of BSD or proprietary Unix fans, the early Linux distros were just throwing together a haphazard collection of poorly tested components.
- forgottenpass 12y ago
  I actually don't know what you mean with "criticism of UNIX traditionalists for years" "of" meaning "belonging to" not "directed at." Confused me for a bit too.
makomk 12y ago
Yeah, and from what I've heard most Solaris (and proprietary Unix) installs wound up with a copy of the GNU utilities installed somewhere and added to the sysadmin's PATH because the bundled ones were shit. Before Linux came along, this was the main use of stuff like GNU coreutils. I'm not sure this is really an aspect of traditional Unix we want to be imitating.

by jdub 12y ago

bhaak 12y ago

I'm very well aware of the difference of Unix and Linux. I even smiled slighty as he also could just have claimed Linux to not be Unix and that would have been undisputable. I actually don't know what you mean with "criticism of UNIX traditionalists for years" in regards to the Linux kernel and the userland. I know of Linus' disregard of POSIX where it's crappy or doesn't make any sense anymore in his opinion but that can't extend to the userland as Linus doesn't do userland. Some clarification or links to said criticism would be welcome.

elwin 12y ago
> I actually don't know what you mean with "criticism of UNIX traditionalists for years" in regards to the Linux kernel and the userland. There's a joke from the 90's that goes something like "FreeBSD is what you get when Unix hackers write a Unix clone for the PC. Linux is what you get when PC hackers write a Unix clone for the PC." From the point of view of BSD or proprietary Unix fans, the early Linux distros were just throwing together a haphazard collection of poorly tested components.
forgottenpass 12y ago
I actually don't know what you mean with "criticism of UNIX traditionalists for years" "of" meaning "belonging to" not "directed at." Confused me for a bit too.

makomk 12y ago

Yeah, and from what I've heard most Solaris (and proprietary Unix) installs wound up with a copy of the GNU utilities installed somewhere and added to the sysadmin's PATH because the bundled ones were shit. Before Linux came along, this was the main use of stuff like GNU coreutils. I'm not sure this is really an aspect of traditional Unix we want to be imitating.