Re: XDG and Freedesktop

On Tue, 1 Jul 2025 09:01:50 -0700, John Ames wrote:

OSX is marvelous - it's Unix when freenix zealots want to count it for
representation in popularity contests vs. The Great Satan of Redmond,
but *not* Unix when they need to justify some arbitrary decision of a
freenix "standards" group as The Only Way. A true chameleon!

There is this thing called “the Unix philosophy”. Or perhaps we should
start calling it “the *nix philosophy”, to get away from any trademark
confusion.

One of its principles is “mechanism, not policy”. The OS kernel and core
userland should be a versatile toolkit on top of which the user/developer/
admin can build more specialized applications; that core should not
enforce any particular policies about how such apps should work, instead
just providing a suitably-general mechanism on which the user/developer/
admin can implement just about any policy they desire.

Consider how the X11 display server, and its Wayland successor, conform to
this philosophy, being basically toolkits on top of which you can build
countless different styles of GUIs. Or even none at all, if that’s your
desire. And consider how MacOS violates that philosophy, by inextricably
binding its “One True” GUI, right up to a very high level, directly into
the OS kernel.