deleted by creator
thank you
What an odd article. First, the author goes to great lengths to assert that “Linux IS UNIX” with pretty circumstantial evidence at best. Then, I guess to hide the fact the his point has not proved, he goes through the history of UNIX, I guess to re-enforce that Linux is just a small piece of the UNIX universe? Then, he chastises people working on Linux for not staying true to the UNIX philosophy and original design principles.
Questions like “are you sure this is a UNIX tool?” do not land with the weight he hopes as the answer os almost certainly “No. This is not a “UNIX” tool. It is not trying to be. Linux is not UNIX.”
The article seems to be mostly a complaint that Linux is not staying true enough to UNIX. The author does not really establish why that is a problem though.
There is an implication I guess that the point of POSIX and then we UNIX certification was to bring compatibility to the universe of diverging and incompatible Unices. While I agree that fragmentation works against commercial success, this is not a very strong point. Not only was the UNIX universe ( with its coherent design philosophy and open specifications ) completely dominated by Windows in the market but they were also completely displaced by Linux ( without the UNIX certification ).
Big companies found in Linux a platform that they could collaborate on. In practice, Linux is less fragmented and more ubiquitous than UNiX ever was before Linux. Critically, Linux has been able to evolve beyond the UNIX certification.
Linux does follow standards. There is POSIX of course. There is the LSB. There is freedesktop.org. There are others. There is also only one kernel.
Linux remains too fragmented on the desktop to displace Windows. To address that, a standard set of Linux standards are emerging: including Wayland, pipewire, and Flatpak.
Wayland is an evolution of the Linux desktop. It is a standard. There is a specification. There is a lot of collaboration around its evolution.
As for “other” systems, I would argue that compatibility with Linux will be more useful to them than compatibility with “UNIX”. I would expect other systems to adopt Wayland in time. It is already supported on systems like Haiku. FreeBSD is working on it as well.
This is my real problem with this (and also broadly pointing the finger to the “Unix philosophy” whenever a project like systemd or Wayland exists, ignoring that the large, complex, multifaceted, and monolithic Linux kernel itself flies in the face of that philosophy). Linux may have originally been built to be Unix-like but has become its own thing that shares a few similarities with Unix.
The author lost me at “Linux is Unix.” I kept reading and it didn’t get any better. 🥺
Blah blah blah blah blah…
tl;dr the author never actually gets to the point stated in the title about what the “problem” is with the direction of Linux and/or how knowing the history of UNIX would allegedly solve this. The author mainly goes off on a tangent listing out every UNIX and POSIX system in their history of UNIX.
If I understand correctly, the author sort of backs into the argument that, because certain Chinese distros like Huawei EulerOS and Inspur K/UX were UNIX-certified by Open Group, Linux therefore is a UNIX and not merely UNIX-like. The author seems to be indirectly implying that all of Linux therefore needs to be made fully UNIX-compatible at a native level and not just via translation layers.
Towards the end, the author points out that Wayland doesn’t comply with UNIX principles because the graphics stack does not follow the “everything is a file” principle, despite previously admitting that basically no graphics stack, like X11 or MacOS’s graphics stack, has ever done this.
Help me out if I am missing something, but all of this fails to articulate why any of this is a “problem” which will lead to some kind of dead-end for Linux or why making all parts of Linux UNIX-compatible would be helpful or preferable. The author seems to assume out of hand that making systems UNIX-compatible is an end unto itself.
deleted by creator
For those unaware, your thesis concept is also known as BLUF: Bottom-Line Up Front. Take a moment after you’ve finished your masterpiece to summarise it at the top in one sentence, or two at most.
A tl;dr at the end of a post also works, but only for those who think to check for it. But either option works.
We got shoveled systems like the worst shit sandwich.
Anything supporting the Unix principle of design needs to address that cancer.
This was a history lesson which has nothing to do with the issue raised by the title.
