What's Wrong with Unix?

aaron240 asks: "When Google published the GLAT (Google Labs Aptitude Test) the Unix question was intriguing. They asked an open-ended question about what is wrong with Unix and how you might fix it. Rob Pike touched on the question in his Slashdot interview from October. What insightful answers did the rest of Slashdot give when they applied to work at Google? To repeat the actual question, 'What's broken with Unix? How would you fix it?'"

Several frustrating points

[SIGALRM (784769)]

What's wrong with UNIX? Depends on which perspective you start...

In my opinion, here are some headaches that have plagued a wary UNIX engineer or two:

IEEE and Posix, X/Open, etc. provide a basis for standardizing UNIX interfaces, but adherence tends to be spotty

Difficult to implement a microkernel architecture

XPG3 aside, a de facto "common API" has never really been acheived

In many cases, code scrutiny is difficult or impossible

Progress and innovation tends to occur within the context of aquisitions (i.e. UnixWare)

The COFF symbolic system is terrible (OK, I know it's a deprecated, but still...)

PIT initialization (time management)

Kernel tuning (anyone fiddled with the /etc/conf/cf.d subdir on OS5?) These are just a few things, in my experience. That said, UNIX has had some great days.

KSpaceDuel

[jkauzlar (596349)]

Certainly this component of Linux needs rewritten. Firstly, it is far too difficult to maneuver your ship with the gravity the way it is, and secondly, the bullets go too slowly. Thirdly, it isn't intuitive what the different colored blobs are; its easy to forget what is energy and what is a mine, or something like that.

I would suggest to the KSpaceDuel team that they meet with the KAsteroids team to discuss usability issues. There should also be a cap on how fast you can go, since it is possible to speed up so fast that your spacecraft appears to be moving very slowly (sort of like a tire in motion).

Re:Several frustrating points

[Anonymous Coward]

In addition:

1. Crappy filesystem. Resier4 or XFS is what UNIX should have started with and even now we don't have file versioning.
2. POSIX permisions suck. The suid bit sucks even more. ACL's make more sense, and UNIX should have had them from the start. If we're doing it now, capabilities would be even better.
3. IPC primitives are poor. SySV shared memory goes some way to helping, and UNIX domain sockets are O.K, but a proper message/event marsheling system would eclipse them all.
4. The filesystem hierachy is an awful mess. Non-standard across all unices and poorly evolved to cope with modern systems. /etc was a horrible copout and it shows. UNIX needs proper application packaging with proper self-contained application packages.
5. Providing lots of little applications to do specific tasks was the best idea ever, but not providing a decent scripting language to bind them together was a bone-headed mistake. Likewise not standardising some basic data-interchange formats (Even it was just pre-formated ASCII) just makes piping all those little tools together to do anything useful a pain.

Re:Several frustrating points

[insert_username_here (844281)]

Mod parent up!!

I've been happily using Linux on my home PC for about 4 years, but the filesystem layout has always been an annoyance.

Without a package manager, it's practically impossible to remove a program; even with a package manager, you can't even determine how big a given package is! (if you know how to with Portage, I'd like to know). A better filesystem layout (perhaps the way MacOSX, GoboLinux or RoX does it) would make package managers obsolete.

A lack of standard configuration layout is another thing: why should people have to learn hundreds of config file formats? Yes, comments help, but it'd be nice if they weren't needed. Why not come up with one standard text-based config format/filesystem layout and get everyone to use it? This would also save programming time, as you could create a library (with a name like libconfig or something similar) and not have to worry about parsing configuration settings. The Windows Registry Hell can be avoided by using a text-based format(e.g. like Java properties files or XML).

A standard configuration layout (with suitable metadata) would also go a long way to allowing a standard graphical system configuration utility (Whatever happened to linuxconf? I loved that app!), making Unix/Linux that much more accessible to ordinary people.

Replies, flames, etc.

Re:Several frustrating points

[MarkByers (770551)]

even with a package manager, you can't even determine how big a given package is! (if you know how to with Portage, I'd like to know)

equery size package

equery is part of gentoolkit

Re:Several frustrating points

[crmartin (98227)]

It's clearly time for my periodic "you young pups don't know your history" posts.

1. Reiserfs etc are the results of 30 years of research that, well, hadn't happened 30 years ago. the i-node/u-node business was the best there was. Then.
2. Multics had general, configurable, role-based, magic ACLs; UNIX lost them on purpose becuse it wasn't well suited to a big games system and word-processor, which is what UNIX was meant for originally.
3. When I was a kid we hardly HAD processes, much less IPC. Having named pipes was a helluvan innovation.
4. That's not the operating system, that's book-keeping.
5. /bin/sh WAS the coolest scripting language ever. They've gotten better. text files with field seperators (that all passwd(5) is, after all) were the uniform data representation.

If you were to go back to System 3 UNIX, you'd have most everything you're asking for here. It wouldn't be as powerful, but it'd be uniform.

Re:Several frustrating points

[X (1235)]

Responding point by point:

1. It's easy in hindsight to critique filesystems. While the original SysV filesystem was pretty bad, the Berkeley Fast Filesystem was already pretty good for it's time. The simplicity of the Unix filesystem has actually been a key aspect of Unix's success. Even on platforms with more complex filesystem API's, you don't see much in the way of applications taking advantage of them.
2. POSIX ACL's have been around for a long time at this point. The relatively pathetic rate at which they've been adopted and taken advantage of should be a clue to their shortcomings. Several security experts have pointed out that while ACL's are great on paper, in reality they increase the complexity of the security model, which in practice is more of a liability.
3. SysV has message queues for IPC. Everything you could want and... not a lot of people use them. ;-) ONC RPC also prvides a pretty decent message/event marshalling mechanism, and you don't see a lot of new apps being written to use that either. Think about why. I would say though it'd be nice if there was a better standard model for kernel events beyond signals.
4. I honestly still find advantages to the traditional Unix FSH, particularly for administrators. It certainly beats the crazy structures on Windows or OS X. End users increasingly care less about where program files are located on their system, so this seems like the wrong area to work on things.
5. Unix did include decent scripting languages, and more importantly provided for additional ones to be added to the system (witness the rise of ksh, perl, python, etc.). If there had been any kind of data-interchange format that was remotely useful, it surely would have dictated how Unix tools work with those data formats. Unfortunately, there were weren't (and aren't). Consequently, dictating standards wouldn't have solved the problem you're describing, as you'd still have to translate non-standard formats into the standard formats and back again. Letting tools like sed/awk/perl evolve to solve the problem seems like a far more practical approach if you ask me.

Re:Several frustrating points

[mrroach (164090)]

> The lack of ACLs is a major impediment to uptake
> of Linux in the business community.

This is not at all insightful. It is uninformed at best. Posix ACLs exist on ext2/3,xfs,reiser,jfs. These ACLs are also completely supported by Samba (and have been for many years).

-Mark

Here's a start:

[Slack3r78 (596506)]

The Unix Hater's Handbook [microsoft.com]

Yes, the link is hosted on MS servers, but before you ignore it for that, at least notice that the forward is by Dennis Ritchie and it was contributed to primarily by Unix geeks. It's about 10 years old, but large portions of it are still relevent today.

Re:Here's a start:

[Zeinfeld (263942)]

Yes, the link is hosted on MS servers, but before you ignore it for that, at least notice that the forward is by Dennis Ritchie and it was contributed to primarily by Unix geeks. It's about 10 years old, but large portions of it are still relevent today.

I think most of us on the Unix Haters list were Lisp machine or VMS hackers who were pretty upset that a piece of utter crap was winning the O/S standards wars at the time.

The forward by Dennis is actually an anti-forward, more of a backward. At the time he was working on Plan-9 which takes all the best ideas from UNIX and junks them, leaving only the unrefined crud that is best ignored.

The book is somewhat uneven in its criticisms, I don't think that the gripes abous X-Windows hit the mark as well as when they are explaining the file systems lossage.

Ultimately the problem with Unix is that it is built the way that cars used to be built before Henry Ford, its a computer O/S for folk who like to spend their time tinkering with their system and like endless opportunities for low grade intellectual stimulation because thats an end in itself for them.

Unix still has the same major architectural deficiencies. The inter process communication is not up to much, the concurrency model is weak, the user interface is eratic and there is no consistency. Documentation is a complete joke.

Re:Here's a start:

[Taladar (717494)]

Documentation is a complete joke.

So which do you prefer? Unix Man Pages that contain all there is to know about a certain app in a not quite end user refined form or Windows Assistants ("Did you plug in the Cable?" - "Yes" - "Then I can't help you - call your vendor") and cryptic error codes?

Re:Here's a start:

[spectecjr (31235)]

So which do you prefer? Unix Man Pages that contain all there is to know about a certain app in a not quite end user refined form or Windows Assistants ("Did you plug in the Cable?" - "Yes" - "Then I can't help you - call your vendor") and cryptic error codes?

I prefer MSDN [microsoft.com]. Call me when Unix has something that even approaches the ease of use and the amount of readable samples, explanations etc. of key APIs.

And no, the System V paper manuals don't count.

Amen!

[pVoid (607584)]

The File System. Sure It Corrupts Your Files, But Look How Fast It Is!

That's probably the single biggest problem I see with nix machines. Lazy filesystems have always reminded me of experimental planes developped by the cold war military to up the world speed record. Planes which would basically self destruct if they god forbid hit a pothole while taxying out of the hangar. RAID is obviously not a solution, and I find that backups - while essential for mission critical applications - should not be used as an excuse to allow for making a file system that is as brittle as this.

As a broader comment, I just find that UNIX is a brittle OS. Before every zealot jumps on this statement I should clear up what I mean: the OS components are extremely lean, they do exactly what they're meant to do, but there's absolutely no inherent 'imune system' to the OS. su can go ahead unlink the root node, a power failure and the file system goes to hell, there isn't any cohesive way to manage machine state. Every daemon runs in its own little planet, unaware of everything else.

The article the other day on /. about Sun's attempts at self healing software address parts of this actually. And other really cool apps like tripwire address other points too. But in general, the OS itself is completly stripped of an immune system.

When Microsoft first introduced the Windows File Protection service, I was really pissed off they did something which should have been done via proper security measures (which common users were short circuiting by running as admin). But the more I face the idea, the more I realize that it's not a bad idea after all, proper code signing, system level integrity checks, basically a path towards actual 'self healing systems'.

In general though, everyone has a long way to go still...

Re:Several frustrating points

[jargoone (166102)]

Add another thing that's wrong with Unix: the elitist attitude towards outsiders.

Re:Several frustrating points

[linguae (763922)]

I strongly agree. Snide comments such as "BSD isn't for you," especially if the person trying to install it seems interested in learning about it, isn't going to help the Unix installed base grow. Such trolls hurt the *nix community in general because they are turning away prospective users.

If anything, us Unix users should be trying to convert as many people as we can to our OS, not turning them off and turning them away.

Re:Several frustrating points

[antoy (665494)]

Given the skill and experience that it takes, in my experience, to be able to run Unix as naturally as some people do... perhaps they've earned that attitude.

That's complete nonsense. Installing and running Unix hardly counts as one of the more difficult intellectual tasks. It's hard, sure, if you're used to something different, but the description 'windows people' includes novelists, artists and nuclear scientists who just don't give a damn about the stupid OS their computer runs.

Would you like it if an artist made fun of your pens and call you and your friends BIC people? Well, that's how stupid this sounds.

Re:IMHO, none of that matters to the typical end u

[sloanster (213766)]

Development for apps for "all" linuxs is right out, which means big commercial closed source players aren't interested, which in turn means we have to keep Windows machines around to get some kinds of work done, which sucks.

Actually there are a number of examples which put the lie to your charge, apart from the obvious case where a linux admin doesn't even install a GUI. (linux gives you that flexibility) But a number of commercial vendors provide programs which run on any modern linux distro with X windows, e.g. netscape - but in practical terms, any modern linux distro ships with both qt and gtk apps. So any app built on either native xlib, qt or gtk will run on any modern linux system.

Linux has a pretty poor cache and swap system, combined with zero user level control over cache and swap. As a result, over time, the OS runs slower, and s l o w e r and s... l.... o..... w...... r....... until you restart, and then it's back to being fairly snappy until it fills up memory again with things it shouldn't be caching,

LOL, mod parent up funny - linux memory management is actually pretty decent. I don't buy into the hype about running slower and slower and finally needing a reboot, that sounds like too much microsoft thinking. Our mail servers which are currently on a 700+ day uptime are processing messages just as fast as they were when first booted.

Sorry, your story just doesn't hold up.

Re:That's not just unix. :P

[tulare (244053)]

Heh. For a really good time, try going into #debian on freenode [irc] and asking any question, no matter how esoteric. You're bound to get about three or four RTFMs, and one guy who will pmsg you with more helpful information. Note: I just switched to deb after several years of RPM-based distros, and am not a complete n00b here, so the attitude I encountered was offputting to say the least. Imagine sending your grandma in there for help - she'd probably smack you with her purse the next time she saw you!

Screen is too black...

[raile (610069)]

I'm used to reading my system text as a white font on a blue background.

OS X

[BWJones (18351)]

Based upon my experience with IRIX and Solaris (with some Linux), I would have to say that most of the things that *NIX did poorly have been rectified with OS X. I would have said OS X was still lacking true 64bitness, but that is coming in 10.4 rather quickly now. The numbers of Macs involved in secure and classified work in the Federal government have been exploding and high bandwidth networking options for cluster computing have also been resolved with options such as Infiniband. Development issues have been streamlined with rather nice tools from Apple itself obtained via NeXT. Open standards are being embraced just about everywhere you turn in OS X, a true plug and play environment now exists (I am reminded of the last video card install on my SGI O2 which had me down for two days solid), the GUI is consistent and the CLI is present and fully integrated with the GUI as well. Additionally, more and more networking options are being supported natively within OS X which is one of the last hurdles to true interconnectivity cross platform. And the G5! Oh, the G5 is a wonderful bit of hardware with which to run *NIX on.

Problems that remain are being able to create one seamless environment with shared memory and such, but the rest of the *NIX world is still having those problems as well.

You can argue about the specifics and details of many things, but in terms of a UNIX workstation, OS X pretty much has it all for our needs.

Re:OS X

[ducomputergeek (595742)]

I generally have to agree. I had used solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD systems before switching to OSX about 2.5 years ago. Granted I'm still running on my G3 iBook so the great power of the G5 chips are of little conquence, I've been developing for *iux web systems for 2 years now on Mac.

That coupled with the ablity to stay connected to the rest of the business world via MS Office for Mac and Adobe tools along with fine opensource apps such as Blender, and Apple only software like Final Cut Pro has been great.

What has happened to Unix is that Apple has developed the better *iux desktop system that coupled with the new G5's has been the final death nail into SGI coffin and put the hurt on SUN. Back in the days at McDonnell Douglas (now boeing), much of the engineering development was done on extremely expensive Sun workstations that could easily run $20k a peice. Today, a lot of development and code is being written on $3000 - $4000 PowerMac G5's.

While Apple remains expensive for many consumer users, in engineering and scientific fields, the PowerMacs with OSX are extremely inexpensive. Many of my friends in scientific fields have flocked to Macs with OS X in the past three years.

Re:OS X

[hey (83763)]

Lots of people agree that OS X is the best Unix going. So now us Linux fans has something to copy. Lets get started.

Re:OS X

[edesjard (588174)]

This is actually a really good point. My biggest complaint about Linux has always been that it constantly tries to copy WINDOWS which I have been totally disgusted by and why I love my Mac. I keep hearing that everyone wants OS X on x86 hardware. Why hasn't Linux, which appears to be floundering aimlessly, focused its efforts on being more like OS X than Windows? Isn't it what will REALLY motivate people to give Linux a try?

And Apple is Open, what's the problem.

[MarcQuadra (129430)]

OK, you know about Darwin, but if you go to the Apple site you can look at the code for WebCore, OpenDirectory, Apple's Kerberos implementation, Darwin Streaming Server, Apple's drivers for their hardware, their mods to CUPS, Samba, ZeroConf, GCC, Apache, and a whole SLEW of other stuff.

The only stuff they don't give you is the source code to Aqua and their in-aqua userland apps, which makes sense, because giving that stuff away would be business suicide.

When Apple said they were going 'open source' it didn't say they were going to release the source to their core apps, like the Finder and iPhoto, but they've been very generous about contributing the code they borrowed and modified back to the community.

It should also be noted that Apple gives back to the projects they work on, GCC has come quite a way on the PowerPC since 3.0 thanks to Apple.

In my opinion, Apple's strategy is one I'd like to see some vendor take with Linux, you take the kernel and mod it for high-performance desktop apps, get GTK+ running on an accelerated OpenGL framebuffer, tweak and simplify a slew of apps and SELL it. As long as the mods to existing software make it back to the community, it's a net gain for all of us.

Problem already fixed, for a while now

[daveschroeder (516195)]

1. Since Mac OS X 10.0, you could have used UFS with Mac OS X if you really needed case sensitivity (though, using UFS broke some other things, like Classic, some Carbon installers, etc).

2. Regardless of 1., as of Mac OS X 10.3.x, Apple now has "Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive)": a fully case-sensitive, fully supported case-sensitive HFS+ filesystem. It's not exposed in the GUI of Disk Utility on Mac OS X client (as Journaling wasn't on Mac OS X 10.2.x client), but it can be enabled via the command line:

sudo diskutil eraseVolume Case-sensitiveHFS+ DiskName /Volumes/SomeDisk

man diskutil for more info. This is exposed in the GUI of Disk Utility on Mac OS X Server 10.3.x. If you would like your primary volume to be case sensitive, you can use/borrow a Mac OS X Server CD to boot your machine, format your primary volume as Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive), and then install Mac OS X (or copy back all of your data with a utility such as asr or Carbon Copy Cloner).

Case preservation (as opposed to case sensitivity) was never advertised or presented as a "feature"; it was an artifact of HFS.

needs some VMS stuff

[*no comment* (239368)]

I like Unix, but I think I'd add some VMS stuff. Like a Delete attribute. VMS you can set people to have read/write/execute and delete. in unix if people have write, they can write it to "null" *grumble*.

Re:needs some VMS stuff

[pclminion (145572)]

My point was, why protect against somebody "deleting" a file when they can just overwrite it with zeros? It's the same thing, right?

If you really want the kind of behavior you are talking about (although I can't imagine why), you can do it by making a hard link to the file in question into a directory which is "safe" from the user you are protecting against. They are still able to move the file around, modify it, etc. But if they delete it, the second hard link still remains, so the file is not actually deleted.

Re:needs some VMS stuff

[tntguy (516721)]

I can't count the number of times I've dragged a file to the "Overwrite With Nuls" icon on the desktop. This wouldn't help at all!

Re:needs some VMS stuff

[*no comment* (239368)]

Well to work properly it would also need to have the versioned filesystem of VMS. So if someone were to say overwrite it with zero's then you just revert back to the previous version that wasn't zero's. You see? If the file is deleted the file is gone, but if someone changes the file to be useless, then I could jsut revert it. Make sense? There's no way anyone with only write permission could destroy any part of the system permanently. It's just a one command restore.

Program Installation Locations

[ShortSpecialBus (236232)]

The first thing to change should be how programs get installed.

EVERYTHING right now goes in /usr, without a directory, because everybody is too lazy to have /usr/foo/bin and /usr/foo/lib in their respective environment variables, because it's too much of a "pain" to put them in there on software installation, and it makes library linking more difficult.

Right now, if I want to uninstall a program, I have to remove it from about 10 different places, many of which aren't obvious (/etc, /usr/lib, /usr/bin, /usr/share, et al.) and there's no good way to do it.

Find a way (maybe symlinks /usr/lib/foo.so -> /usr/local/foo/lib/foo.so, maybe something else, I don't care) to make it so program installation/uninstallation makes more sense.

Re:Program Installation Locations

[umrk (99195)]

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/stow/foo-1.2
make
sudo make install
sudo stow /usr/local/stow/foo-1.2

Done.

Re:Program Installation Locations

[mandos (8379)]

This is basically what Gobo Linux is trying to accomplish. From their FAQ:

• 
  GoboLinux is a Linux distribution that breaks with the historical Unix directory hierarchy. Basically, this means that there are no directories such as /usr and /etc. The main idea of the alternative hierarchy is to store all files belonging to an application in its own separate subtree; therefore we have directories such as /Programs/GCC/2.95.3/lib.
  
  To allow the system to find these files, they are logically grouped in directories such as /System/Links/Executables, which, you guessed it, contains symbolic links to all executable files inside the Programs hierarchy.
  
  To maintain backwards compatibility with traditional Unix/Linux apps, there are symbolic links that mimic the Unix tree, such as "/usr/bin -> /System/Links/Executables", and "/sbin -> /System/Links/Executables" (this example shows that arbitrary differentiations between files of the same category were also removed).
  
  www.gobolinux.org
  

Re:Program Installation Locations

[mce (509)]

Before you make statements about how things are installed on UNIX, you should understand that what you seem to know is a personal Linux box on which you can do everything you please and of which you don't understand the package management. It is not the UNIX way.

In the true UNIX world, application software has always been such that it can be installed stand alone underneath ONE directory, quite simply because in the true UNIX world not every (other) user has root powers and the people who do have them understand that they don't want to mix shared application files with local OS files the way toy OS-es such as Windows and (sadly) some Linux distros do.

Where I work, we install evereything in networked directories called /our-company-name/software/package-name/version. Then we wrap everything in shell scripts that automatically select the correct platform (HP-UX, Solaris, Linux) on the fly and that automatically set every single environment variable the softare needs. Then we add links to make a specific package version current and publish the key binaries of packages that many people use through 1 common bin directory. Not a single file needs to be stored and/or managed locally (crucial, considering the amount of machines involved).

And now comes the best part: I (yes, I developed the setup and do most of the maintainance) do not even need root powers for anything.

Re:Program Installation Locations

[Tet (2721)]

Look at windows: you clearly specify the installatino directory, and then *all* the files go there.

I can't work out if you're trolling or just genuinely ignorant. Under Windows, everything goes in your selected installation directory... except for the bits that don't. Some have to go in the system directories and there are usually registry entries made. In contrast, if you tell a Unix application to install in a given directory, it generally does, and doesn't pollute the file heirarchy outside of your chosen location. If you're installing it from an RPM or dpkg, then it usually does the same, but it's effectively using a shared install directory between multiple apps. But why do you care where it puts the files? Use the package manager to tell you which files came with which package, and to remove the package if you're done with it.

The exact location doesn't matter to me.

[WebCowboy (196209)]

What matters to me is that there is some semblance of CONSISTENCY. That is why I hope more attention is paid to FHS and LSB. Package managers can do the housekeeping--I don't care--but Fedora and Mandrake and SuSE and many others use RPM and their packages are STILL specific to their distros (even though Mandrake started as a supposedly Red Hat compatible distro way back when). I really wish RPMs at the application level were LSB compliant so they'd play nicely.

On another note, there are reasons why apps on UNIX become installed in shared directories--it is because path management can become tedious--the PATH environment var becomes too long, or else you have to sprinkle links about your filesystem. In the GUI world this isn't really an issue, but some of us still like the command line and write scripts and typing /usr/myapp/1.0/bin/startmyapp instead of startmyapp at the prompt is annoying.

BTW, it seems you have MS Windows confused with the Mac (the only modern PC platform I know of where the "copy a folder" install method is still commonplace). Win apps most certainly do NOT install in a single directory--nearly all use the central, monolithic, non-human-readable REGISTRY to store configurations, and typically throw .dll and other files in C:\WINNT, C:\SYSTEM32 etc etc. The "install with a single xcopy command" nirvana only exists in the dreams of .NET fanboys (it might be possible technically it won't and can't happen for a couple years yet).

Re:Program Installation Locations

[i am fishhead (580982)]

Well, it depends on what you want to do. Until I started to admin a linux cluster, I didn't really understand why this was done either.

1) Most of the folders have a PURPOSE. /bin has vital system binaries (sh, login, and so on), /sbin has binaries and daemons vital to starting up the system, /etc has files containing startup and default settings, /var has variable information (like logs), /tmp is for temporary files, and so on.

Why is this powerful? Well ...

- Want your machines to behave similarly on startup? Replicate /etc on these machines or have them mount a shared /etc on top of the original early in the boot process.
- Want to have faster access to temporary files? Make /tmp be on a ramdisk.
- Want to limit log sizes so they don't fill up the disk? Make a seperate partition for /var
- Want to shared data across a bunch of *nix boxen? Make /usr/share and friends NFS shares.
In general, You can do interesting things by combining the fact that directories are usually per-purpose rathar than per-program. Granted, in the desktop world, this isn't so much useful, but it makes cluster management and system maintainence SO much easier.

2) The issue you complain about can be taken care of by a package management system or some arangement of symlinks.

Re:Program Installation Locations

[Slack3r78 (596506)]

It doesn't even have to be an installer. Ever used OS X? To install software on X, you simply drag a .APP container file into your Applications directory. To uninstall, you drag it to the trash.

How is this not better than the current Unix way of doing things?

Re:Program Installation Locations

[forkazoo (138186)]

OS X also has a package manager, which IMHO, is much more trustworthy than an executable installer. My only real complaint is that so many MAc OS X packages insist on being installed on the main drive. That makes me sad.

Re:Program Installation Locations

[diegocgteleline.es (653730)]

Or what plan9 does, just kill the $PATH variable.

In plan9 you don't have a "$PATH variable", instead you have several directories (/whatever/arch-dependent-bin, /whatever/arch-independent-bin, ~/my-own-bin) and you just "join" them in a single directory: /bin (In plan9 every process can configure their filesystem namespace like they want and normal users are allowed to do things like that)

configuration

[meshko (413657)]

I think the biggest problem with Unix is the lack of standardized way of doing certain things, in particular program configuration. Even simple programs that require very simple configuraiton store it in random places and formats. Not to mention things that require some serious config files, like sendmail, apache or X. Creating a cross-platform powerful configuration language would help.

Re:configuration

[killjoe (766577)]

Ideally all confi files would follow the same format and syntax (god no please don't say XML).

Ideally there would be a uniform way for programs to retrieve configuration information from a centrallized location.

Ideally local users and machines would be able to merge their prefs and config with the master to override certain prefs.

Ideally the hierarcy of administrators would be able to prevent entitities under them from overriding certain configuration options.

Ideally all of that could be done with plain text files which are automatically checked into a version control repository so you can roll back any change in a jiffy.

Does it reliably enable true modern computing?

[Ars-Fartsica (166957)]

Does unix enable people to build clusters, serve multimedia content, create sustainable high-throughput networks etc etc? Yes. Most implementations also provide for these true modern computing environments reliably and cheaply. What else do you want an OS to do? If an OS can reliably enable the modern application layer, to me it has satisfied the criteria of an OS.

While I agree that the core OS has not moved much in decades, I also see very little motivation for this as much of the required functionality has moved up the stack to the application layer.

Plan9 is what's right with UNIX

[andrewzx1 (832134)]

If you read the motivations behind writing Plan9 (documented on slashdot previously), there are many descriptions of what the authors thought was wrong with UNIX. And the guys who wrote Plan9 are the same guys who wrote the better part of UNIX. And for you youngsters, UNIX is not LINUX. - AndrewZ

cynical view

[Keitopsis (766128)]

Problem:
Unix is great!, unless:
- You just want a plug and pray answer
- You just want a word processor
- You just want ......

If someone is only looking for a single application, it is hard to shove such a versitile system down their throat.

Solution:
Create a truely modular UNIX/OS that does not depend on any single environment(init/SYSV). Make a pluggable API-level interface that you can plug anything from a single application to a complete system environment into. Then get someone to develop EXACTLY what you want.

Idiotware without the bloat.

Laughing all the way,

-- Kei

Easy!

[Telastyn (206146)]

Lack of coherent newbie documentation.

Sure, man pages exist, but even once you learn that man does what help really should the man pages are generally written by programmers for programmers.

Newbie guides generally don't get any further than a small command summary, which doesn't really show any strengths of unix over using a gui [or windows!]

The best thing I think would be to provide more "whole system" examples/help rather than help for each individual command. Take some nice simple topics [how to add many users, how to determine network utilization programatically, how to determine open ports and what process is using them...] which are painful to do on windows and use a variety of unix tools to solve them.

There's only one thing wrong with UNIX:

[gellenburg (61212)]

Not everyone's running it.

Laugh.

It's a joke.

The C language

[lazy_arabica (750133)]

Yeah, I know that most *nix lover simply love it. But let's face it : this language, which is still the most important one in a unix environment, is really aging. It is possible to develop big software in pure C, but it takes much, much time, and the risk of introducing bugs and security flows is huge. Only the minimal low-level core of the system should be based on C ; the rest should be developed in a modern, high-level language.

In no specific order:

[Qbertino (265505)]

-the allmighty root (single largest security risk)

-ancient directory organization which doesn't take modern computer usage into account (more powerfull single workstations)

-bad historically grown naming ("home", "usr", "var", etc.) and incosequent File System Herarchy Standard

-crappy vendor support

-unix printing still sucks big time (see 'vendor support')

-grafics system and font handling

-inconsistent standards of configration

-histrically grown elitist utility naming (large anoyance)

That's all I can come up with right now. Note that some of these are dealt with by certain unix variants. Printing and pretty much everything else is a breeze on OS X for instance. Configuraion and installation with Debian Linux is very smooth and goes great length to keep those countless OSS utilities manageable. And Solaris 10 seems to have the one or other card up its sleve to deal with security risks that result in the allmighty root.

Coming to think of it: Can't we just have an OS with OS X ease of use, Debians installation system, Solaris 10 low-level features and Windows Vendor support? We'd all be set and 100% satisfied.

My list.

[Yaztromo (655250)]

Here are the general problems I have with Unix and Unix-like operating systems:

• Threading models and scheduling. A few Unicies have decent thread models, but others have abysmal thread models and scheduling. Because of this, far too many Unix applications wind up eschewing threads for simply running multiple processes, which isn't the same thing. Thread priority needs to be global, and the thread should be the most primitive execution unitt upon which all other execution units are built. No more "my thread priority is set to the max, but I get very few slices because my process priority is set low". My OS/2 machine running on a P3-450 can still out-thread many multi-gigahertz Unix systems, and that's just sad. Too many Unix kernels have had threads bolted on as an after-thought, and it shows.

  (Note that this isn't to say that every Unix-style system has a bad threading model -- some of them are pretty good, and others are getting better. But it's currently difficult to write decent cross-platform multithreaded Unix code when some Unicies you know in advance have really crappy threading subsystems).

• Clipboard support in GUI subsystems. Come on, it's 2004 already. Unified clipboards have been around for more than 20 years now, and yet many Unicies still can't get this right. Cutting and pasting between applications shouldn't be a major PITA. Users shouldn't have to worry about which widget library an application was compiled against to figure out if they'll be able to paste to that application from another. Things are getting better, but really, this should have been fixed years ago, and shouldn't be taking so long.
• GUI application font support. Again, a rare few get this right, but most of them have this big conglomeration of font types, and no unified font access system. Windows 3.0 had a beter font subsystem than what some Unicies have.
• Printing. Again, some Unicies have done a good job, but far too many still don't have a good unified printing subsystem. Others here have done a great job of pointing out the problems with Unix printing in general, so I won't rehash them all here.
• Desktop access APIs. Even with KDE and Gnome, there still isn't an API to call to do something as simple as create an application icon on the desktop or in the application menus which can be used to launch an application. Everyone winds up having to roll-their-own, if they bother to do so at all. Again, not all Unix GUI environments suffer from this, but the majority do. As I developer, I shouldn't have to care what environment a user is running if I want to do something like put an icon on their desktop as a part of an installation/configuration routine -- there should be an API I can call that says "create an icon with the following properties", and have it worry about WM/environment specifics.
• USB driver development and device access. Again, in many Unicies this is fundementally flawed and can be very difficult for users to set-up and configure. And it differs drastically from Unix to Unix. Where we have pretty standard systems for accessing RS-232 serial ports, and parallel ports, USB access is completely non-standardized across Unicies. Just witness the PITA it is to set-up the newly standardized javax.usp API on Linux, and the kernel work-arounds that had to be implemented to allow APIs like this to unload aggressive modules that grab interface focus immediately just because they were included with the distro. There isn't much excuse for this IMO.
• Unicode support. Again, hit or miss.

Okay -- now don't get me wrong -- there are a lot of things to like about Unix and Unix-like environments. But those are the items I personally have problems with in the general case (and again, not all Unicies exhibit all of these issues. In particular, Mac OS X doesn't suffer from any of them, and is my current OS of choice for doing development and as my personal workstation desktop environment).

Yaz.

Re:In a word...

[Tackhead (54550)]

> This sillyness of having to generate postscript so Ghostscript can generate PCL so you can print is just wrong - empty brained, someone forgot to wake up wrong.
>
>PCL is available on every major printer on the market today - it IS the standard. PostScript is a has-been. Dump it today.

Huh? I think you've got that backwards.

PCL requires that most of the "brains" exist on the "computer" side of the "computer/printer" connection. A PCL printer needs less "brains" than a Postscript printer because all the processing is done on the "computer" side of the connection.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but a PCL printer is to a Postscript printer what a Winmodem is to a hardware modem.

For printers, the PCL tradeoff made a lot of sense sense when embedded CPUs were (extremely) limited in computational power compared with desktop CPUs. Rather than have your $1500 486-33 sitting idle as it dumps a pile of Postscript code to another $1000 68020 in the printer, I'll use my $1500 desktop CPU to turn my document into PCL that can be parsed by the $1.99 Z80 or whatever's in my $100 PCL printer.

Now that your $25 disposable cell phone has a 200 MHz core, that tradeoff is no longer a requirement. Embedded systems smart enough to interpret and run Postscript code are no more (and no less) expensive than those capable only of PCL.

Methinks you've got the PCL/Postscript design tradeoff backwards.