Thinking about it, it’s weird that there hasn’t been any real change in operating systems for about 50 years. Unix and its derivatives seem to be almost the only game in town, apart from desktops running Windows.
I think the last one to make any real headway was BeOS and they’ve been dying a thousand deaths ever since Apple bought NeXT instead of them. Though admittedly that perspective is coming from a person who used BeOS once in the 90s and has never touched Haiku.
It’s because you don’t want to reinvent the wheel all the time. It sucks doing it. Lots of effort. It’s much better to build on existing stuff and maybe improve it for your needs.
But that’s the thing: is there only one wheel? Maybe wheels are a bad metaphor here, but isn’t it weird, that there aren’t any fundamentally new concepts? Unix was developed basically during the preschool years of computing and we all just kind of stuck with its concepts.
Depends on the level of abstraction you’re looking at. Operating systems today are vastly more capable of organizing different provesses, distributing work amongst multiple CPU cores, CPU caches, etc. I guess the von Neumann architecture has just proven really successful in practice. And von Neumann machines require a certain set of capabilities in their OSes.
Maybe look at embedded systems, where we find a bit more variety. Things like DSPs or microcontrollers.
There’s other engine designs (ex:rotary engine) but the 4 stroke has over a century of testing, improvements, and refinements. A new design can adapt some of the refinements, but would have to catch up on decades of innovation and testing just to catch up!
On the Unix side, there’s the evolution of the Posix standard (which was based on Unix).
I would point out, by comparison, that piston engines are effectively obsolete for certain applications. Most aircraft operate on some type of jet engine, which involves the same core concepts of thermodynamics and aeronautics, but are still fundamentally different. They also optimize for different criteria, which is why neither jet engines nor piston engines hold a monopoly on any class of vehicle.
This is really stretching the computer metaphor. I think my point is that there will be room for rethinking paradigms as our applications of computers grow to include things that weren’t originally planned for. But in a mature technology there’s a lot of established precedent, and that’s not easily overcome. It takes something that can improve the field like jet engines made new aircraft possible.
Stable in the distro context refers to how often packages change. Sid (which is the one that’s broken in that) is not that. The other 2 are stable in that sense, but older software can sometimes be shaky on newer hardware.
Someone even wrote a version of dc (the arbitrary precision RPN desktop calculator) with it. They were clearly insane of course, but it proves that sed is more than just find and replace.
Honourable mention to awk's sub() and gsub() that, at least for basic find/replace, do the same thing. awk is often surprisingly quick.
You assumption is wrong. I’m a chad that only use terminal and Neovim. I don’t need those filthy mouses. I have a touchpad instead that I also rarely use. I have millions of keymaps engraved in my brain, give me a keyboard and a terminal and I will move mountains.
I started my Linux journey in the 90’s with Red Hat Halloween. I’m sick and tired of troubleshooting and Debian based distros have been fully painless. Those of you learning your craft should absolutely try to manage things like Arch, just leave my old and tired ass be and I’ll sit here with my old kernel and cheer you on.
Yup - if your goal is to use Linux to learn how Linux works and how it’s all put together then Arch is awesome. If you’ve got stuff to do and Linux is a tool to reach another goal, not so much. I like my tools to be stable, reliable and predictable.
this coming from someone who used podman for years for hours for development every day.
podman is cancer, it’s way better to use docker rootless.
podman will break if you sneeze at it, and the only recourse you will find in github is to podman system reset which stinks of bad programming.
docker rootless never breaks, podman may die if you cancel a download because the devs were either inexperienced or bad and instead of protecting the state with atomic filesystem operations they leave dirty files in working directories which make it fail in random and unexpected ways.
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