Return to BSD News archive
Xref: sserve comp.os.386bsd.misc:5003 comp.os.linux.misc:33844 comp.os.os2.advocacy:75415
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!munnari.oz.au!ihnp4.ucsd.edu!agate!128.32.155.1!matt
From: matt@physics7.berkeley.edu (Matt Austern)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc,comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.os2.advocacy
Subject: Re: Linux thoroughly insulted by Infoworld!
Date: 23 Jan 1995 01:15:38 GMT
Organization: Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (Theoretical Physics Group)
Lines: 50
Message-ID: <MATT.95Jan22171538@physics7.berkeley.edu>
References: <950116203411@lambada> <damir-1701951842450001@wetware.is.net>
<3fusgl$1uke@whale.st.usm.edu>
Reply-To: matt@physics.berkeley.edu
NNTP-Posting-Host: physics7.berkeley.edu
In-reply-to: chambles@whale.st.usm.edu's message of 22 Jan 1995 18:16:21 -0600
In article <3fusgl$1uke@whale.st.usm.edu> chambles@whale.st.usm.edu (John William Chambless) writes:
> A favorite source of amusement at our office is the idiotic
> writers who are arguing over whether OS/2 od Winhose NT will be
> the OS of the future.
>
> Meanwhile, the various flavors of Unix have been delivering the
> PROMISED features of these "advanced operating systems" for
> years. What a joke...
That's only partly true. One thing Unix doesn't have is a standard
GUI integrated into the operating system that allows applications
to work together well.
Yes, Unix does have X; X, however, is neither a GUI (it's more like a
toolkit for building GUIs) nor is it integrated into the operating
system. And X evolved in a chaotic enough way so that the various
GUIs built on top of it (e.g., Motif) are rather complicated and
non-orthogonal, both from the user's point of view and the
programmer's.
GUI-style applications with linking and pasting aren't to everyone's
taste, I grant you. In fact, I don't always use them myself; for most
purposes, I like TeX better than any drag-and-drool word processor. I
belong to a minority, though. For the sort of applications that most
people want to use, Unix just isn't as suitable as the Mac, OS/2, or
even Windows.
The one real exception that I can think of is NeXTStep [I'm probably
capitalizing wrong; I capitalize it differently every time I write it,
on the theory that that way I'll get it right some fraction of the
time], which was designed from the beginning with a GUI in mind.
Except that that really leads to another problem, which is that there
are so many different flavors of Unix. Yes, for every nice feature
you can name, you can find at least one Unix flavor that supports
it---but can you name any Unix flavor that has all of them? And even
if you can, is that useful? If you're a software vendor writing for
Unix, the market is fragmented enough so that you can't target just a
single Unix; you have to try for portability, which means that you
might not be able to build your program around nice features that
are only provided by one or two versions of the operating system.
There are a lot of things I like about Unix; I suppose if I were
forced to name a favorite operating system, it probably would be some
BSD-ish Unix. Unix isn't perfect, though, and there really are some
good reasons why it hasn't conquered the personal computer market.
--
--matt