Re: UNIX systems (Was: Re: fdm, paredit and systemd)

On Mon, 10 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:

It's a shame it died. =( Wasn't the idea to refine the good, old, Unix
ideas, and improve on lessons learned?

>
I wouldn't say it died.  I believe Plan 9 is doing pretty well, but I
don't think they're trying to compete with popular systems.  It's a
research system, I'd say.  OpenBSD is a research system, even though
it's totally usable.  In fact, it's the one I like to use.

Would be nice if someone took Plan 9 and managed to get it to run natively on
servers and laptops, or even one brand of server and one brand of laptop. I
would definitely try it!
How is openbsd as a daily driver? I've been close to replacing my opensuse with
freebsd. It wasn't quite there in terms of hardware support (it lacked anything
beyond G wifi, which is too slow). Maybe openbsd is better than freebsd?

I often fantasize if I will see another OS revolution like Linux in my
lifetime. That would be awesome!

>
I feel the revolution is not Linux per se.  Surely Linux is sound---no
doubt there.  But it's also quite clear that Richard Stallman had the
*whole* idea in mind easily before Linux.  Without Linux, for example,
the GNU project could have taken the FreeBSD kernel and made a complete
system out of it.  In fact, they did.  So, the revolution OS is not
quite Linux.  Even because Linux did not bring anything really new back
in the 90s.
>
Perhaps the novelty of the GNU project was that it was Free Software.
>
What I think it's hard to do even today is to think of an operating
system for microcomputers that's really different from UNIX.  It's UNIX
that's the revolution.  And now it's stuck in system developers' mind so
much that I think they hard time coming up with something new.

That's why I think it would be awesome! If someone would be able to come up with
a complete paradigm shift in operating systems. Unix won, windows is getting
closer and closer to unix every year, and I would expect them to just drop
windows in a few years when WSL has taken over "ship of theseus" style.