OpenIndiana Hipster 2021.04 Released For This Solaris/Illumos-Based OS

[dreich]

So once again, where are those numbers?

Everywhere UNIX-like systems like Linux or MacOS are used.

Where do you see the masses who live and swear by "sed/grep/awk/vi"?

Assuming UNIX is limited to the above programs (or programs in general) is myopic, but to answer your question everywhere people may need to edit and process text. These days, this also includes Windows users via WSL.

Msft didn't create WSL for the privilege to endure the bugs of "vi" ...

Unless you represent the WSL team at msft, I cannot take your above commentary seriously. Like it or not, msft created WSL to provide a UNIX shell on Windows. What people do with is most certainly not limited to the views of a particular individual.

Speak for yourself. You may find it unbelievable but i In fact I have a poor opinion of UNIX precisely because I care very much about computers. I also have a lot more respect for those who understand that other users don't care about their computer or their OS and care about getting their own priorities catered for, rather than people who have an ideological fixation on one particular tech without being able to actually explain it in terms of costs & benefits, and who believe that they have to "educate" users about it.

This is just an exposé of personal preferences and priorities and does not change the fact that Linux and Illumos are UNIX-like systems. It is only fair to find users who hold UNIX in high esteem and prefer those systems for what they are. You may disagree and try to "educate" people about the costs & benefits of your own ideological fixation but that is as far as you can go.

[jacob]

Everywhere UNIX-like systems like Linux or MacOS are used.

Which directly contradicts the previous whine in this very thread that systemd, wayland etc are "wiping UNIX out". No-one installs MacOS because of UNIX; people install it for its GUI and user friendliness. BTW both wayland and systemd are directly inspired by MacOS. So I'm afraid that doesn't count as UNIX users any more than Android or iOS do.

Assuming UNIX is limited to the above programs (or programs in general) is myopic

It's not myopic, it's what everyone always brings up when discussing the unix-ness or lack thereof of various OSes.

but to answer your question everywhere people may need to edit and process text. These days, this also includes Windows users via WSL.

Oh but of course, so silly of me I haven't noticed! Everyone installs WSL so that they can edit text and process documents using vi and sed. No-one uses Visual Studio or MS Office! (or VSCode, Eclipse etc. and LibreOffice on Linux).

Unless you represent the WSL team at msft, I cannot take your above commentary seriously. Like it or not, msft created WSL to provide a UNIX shell on Windows. What people do with is most certainly not limited to the views of a particular individual.

MS did not create WSL to provide a UNIX shell on Windows, that had existed long before (ever since Windows NT 3.5 actually) and no-one seemed to particularly care. They created WSL to run Linux binaries on Windows, which is a different motivation and use-case altogether. I don't need to represent the WSL team to be able to read their blogs on the subject or talk with people who actually use it.

This is just an exposé of personal preferences and priorities and does not change the fact that Linux and Illumos are UNIX-like systems. It is only fair to find users who hold UNIX in high esteem and prefer those systems for what they are. You may disagree and try to "educate" people about the costs & benefits of your own ideological fixation but that is as far as you can go.

If you like UNIX for what it is, that's fine. I don't hold it in high esteem at all because it was a poorly thought design from the start that was only kept alive using hackish workarounds and ductape. To think that before UNIX was even created, Multics already had proper ACLs (not the moronic u-g-o scheme), it had actual IPC that could share structured data (not just plain streams of bytes), a sane notion of a user session (which UNIX still doesn't have to this day and when systemd implemented it at long last, the anti-systemd-UNIX-philosophy crowd choked because muh nohup), supported multiprocessing and its configuration and administration was mostly declarative, not based on scripts! Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that Multics "should have won", it had its own big issues. But I see nothing in Unix that would make me hold it in any esteem - vi is so bad that developers of alternatives have to deliberately emulate its bugs (let alone the whole idea that vi is somehow good UI design), the shell is the most error prone programming language ever and even f'in /bin/false has a history of security vulnerabilities. When ESR explains that the "great" UNIX philosophy consists in preferring dumb and inefficient algorithms, doing the wrong thing when it's easier and that the "best" way to handle errors is to silently do something arbitrary, that pretty much sums it up. Like it or not, worse is never better. Worse is simply worse, period. And when the docs or FAQs of some of the true-to-gold-UNIX-distros-with-no-systemd-or-wayland say that to select your keyboard type you have to type "xmodmap ..." (thus using the wrong keyboard bindings!) I feel like I couldn't make that up if I tried.

[onicsis]

I don't get it, how cares so much about Posix or Unix anymore?
FreeBSD is compatible with FreeBSD. Two Linux distros are not so compatible one with each other. MacOS it is compatible with MacOS and so on. Bringing into discussion Devuan who tried to stay compatible as much it's possible today with classic Linux and by inheritance with UNIX, but for that they received so much hate

[jacob]

I don't get it, how cares so much about Posix or Unix anymore?
FreeBSD is compatible with FreeBSD. Two Linux distros are not so compatible one with each other. MacOS it is compatible with MacOS and so on. Bringing into discussion Devuan who tried to stay compatible as much it's possible today with classic Linux and by inheritance with UNIX, but for that they received so much hate

I agree that every OS is and should be compatible with itself, I was never fond of the lowest common denominator mantra. Devuan didn't receive hate for trying to maintain some legacy. There are several other distros in that business (like Void, Alpine, Obarun and a few others) that may not attract much interest but no one hates them. Devuan gets its hate because they were the ones who started spitting venom around, they actively claimed they wanted to derail Debian and were full of s**t by acting as if they were orders of magnitude more important or relevant than they were in reality. For good measure add to their CV that infamous "joke" about hiring an assassin to get Poettering killed or sending him email with Nazi references.

[dreich]

Which directly contradicts the previous whine in this very thread that systemd, wayland etc are "wiping UNIX out".

It does not and I certainly did not whine about systemd and wayland "wiping out UNIX". You're probably quoting somebody else here.

No-one installs MacOS because of UNIX;

No-one installs MacOS, period. No-one installs Linux because of wayland either.

BTW both wayland and systemd are directly inspired by MacOS.

Which is great, MacOS is a UNIX-like system with a fancy GUI.

It's not myopic, it's what everyone always brings up when discussing the unix-ness or lack thereof of various OSes.

The mere fact that everyone brings it up doesn't make it less myopic. Besides sed grep et al are only programs; UNIX is a philosophy the permeates systems design.

MS did not create WSL to provide a UNIX shell on Windows ...

Yes, they did.

[puffpuff]

I really like this debate - it so inspires me to write something smart here...something profound, informative...
now, let's see, what would that be...
please go on?

[jacob]

No-one installs MacOS, period.

Ok, wrong wording. People don't install MacOS themselves but they certainly buy it in droves.

No-one installs Linux because of wayland either.

This just proves my point. People in the real world use Linux for the same reason they use Windows: their software runs on it. Nobody installs Linux for wayland itself because nobody has any reason to care about wayland unless they are a wayland developer. By the same token nobody installs Linux for Xorg or bash. Most people couldn't care less about their TV set, they care about the shows they want to watch.

Which is great, MacOS is a UNIX-like system with a fancy GUI.

MacOS's kernel, graphics stack and userland infrastructure (launchd etc) have nothing to do with UNIX. MacOS software development is also as far removed from UNIX and the UNIX anti-philosophy as it gets. You can optionally run an Unix shell on it, big deal. I'd say about half of its users will never even interact with it. You could run one even on Atari's TOS and on the AmigaOS.

The mere fact that everyone brings it up doesn't make it less myopic. Besides sed grep et al are only programs; UNIX is a philosophy the permeates systems design.

Indeed it is; it is an absolutely terrible philosophy that should only be remembered as an example of what not to do learnt the hard way. The OSes that people actually want to use - Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, linux-as-in-containers-and-systemd-wayland etc. don't follow it, that must mean something.

Yes, they did.

And have you got anything to support that, or are you just sulking and stomping your foot? Cygwin had provided an Unix shell on Windows since 1995; Windows NT included a POSIX subsystem since its very first release; Windows Services for Unix (SFU; not to be confused with WSL) had been available from MS between 1999 and 2019. So an UNIX shell could be used in one way or another on every single NT-based Windows release ever, and in a limited form even on the 9x series. It's not like in 2019 Microsoft suddenly discovered that its users were supposedly desperate for a *nix shell and responded by creating WSL.

[cretin1997]

It's kinda sad that it isn't used more.
Its a real unix system and it works pretty well actually.

Open source OS'es that actually work are few and far on between.

No. It's not working pretty well as you said. Unless, you run it on VirtualBox. On real hardware, it sucked hard.

https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/Tf485390ebc9d5df2/there-is-something-inherently-wrong-with-this-system