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

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.

Re:Several frustrating points

I dunno, maybe you're just trolling (and a number of replies that follow would qualify you as a good troll), but I'd say that installing FreeBSD is not any more difficult than, say, Slackware or Debian. It is more challenging than your Mandrake or RH install, I think (have not had a chance in the last 3-4 years to try either).

That said, with enough preparation and a chapter from the Handbook [freebsd.org] printed out and within a reach installing stock FreeBSD should not be a problem at all.

The question you should, however, ask yourself is Why do I want to try FreeBSD? If it is just because you've heard it's cool -- you may be much better off trying a http://www.freesbie.org/ [freesbie.org] instead. It's a live FreeBSD ssytem, sort of like Knoppix.

If you want to give FreeBSD a spin because you want to understand UNIX-land better or have needs for the stability of the platform, then rough starts should not be anything to discourage you.

In either case -- all the best and have fun!

Re:Several frustrating points

Maybe he got BSD because he doesn't want to be a "Windows Person" anymore..

Re:Several frustrating points

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

Something like that...

..as a Mac admin since '97, it's blackly amusing that now that Apple's shipping unix, all my old linux friends are now flaunting powerbooks. :P

OS X takes the bullshit out of getting Work Done, and that's nice- but in the process, the platform has transitioned from the domain of artists and eccentrics to the khaki-clad GAP-shopping technoratti richass motherfuckers, who have no use for any of the reasons the platform has continued to exist over the past 20 years.

My OS-that-runs-Art doesn't exist anymore. Apple's replaced it with an OS that does everything but Halflife... and to get that, they had to round off some of the edges. :|

Re:That's not just unix. :P

Wow, I find that interesting. The only job I've worked at where Windows and Linux techs worked in the same office, I found the Windows techs to run the greatest gamut of character: being the most haughty and exclusive to the most inviting and inclusive. That's not to mention how much the Linux techs taught me on the job as well.

What I found amoung the Linux techs was a greater investment of time, learning, and adapting to a well designed system that requires more out of you. Heck, you can't get away from being a proficient tech without being able to at least type 35+ words/minute. But, that is just an entry level skill to make the rest of your learning easier.

Because of the learning curve, and the trouble-shooting skills the tech position required, involved in Linux/Unix I can see why some people would take themselves more seriously than meet; thereby deserving of the titles prevously bestowed upon them. Too bad for them, and for you, that they do not instead convey the satisfaction and enjoyment that comes from learning something that does have such a steap learning curve and currently has an underdog image (which really has nothing to do with being satisfying as far as I'm concerned, I just really enjoy the OS itself).

Hmmm, oh well. I guess when it's all said and done, the satisfaction that I get from knowing, not even on a mastry level, of Linux, makes me not really care what others think of me, but I don't want to put them off either because I'm too self-absorbed to give them the same sort of help I too have received in the past from others in the Linux community.

Re:That's not just unix. :P

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!

Re:Several frustrating points

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:Several frustrating points

What you fail to realize is that Linux doesn't exist for newbies to switch off of Windows. It's not there to "Fight The Power."

It's an Operating System. Some people enjoy using it. I do; I love the things I can do with my unix boxes so easily that come so difficult on other systems (Windows.)

You can use it if you want to. There's so many great people working on making it better, easier, etc, that in the end it MAY very well be just as easy to handle as Windows. It's not there yet. What's the rush? So you can install it easier before you know the system?

You're inexperienced in the Internet world if you think that the Linux userbase is a bunch of "inconsiderate pricks." You should see some of the Windows help forums, or the help forums of... anything else, really. There's a lot of pricks out there, you can't avoid that. I have not found this to be any greater with Linuxish forums, mailing lists, etc. In fact, I find that Linux help groups are a lot BETTER then most; there's usually quite a few people that are really knowledgable and willing to help.

Your experience with being called a n00b could be due to the fact that you've been asking the same tired old questions, without reading any of the redily available information online or using the search function on forums. There's a lot of people that WANT to help you - even though you're a complete stranger - but these same people don't want to trudge through the same questions they've already answered a hundred times over.

If you just want to "USE THE COMPUTER" then just USE WHAT YOU KNOW HOW TO USE. Nobody is forcing you to use it. You get to justify the reasons all by yourself, and if you can't justify the learning curve to the benefits, then why do it?

Really, it doesn't matter. I'm not trying to get everyone to use Linux. I'm not telling my sister to install it. Neither is anyone else, really. You might hear from someone how great they think their Linux system is, and even say "you should give it a shot!" but it doesn't matter if you use it or not. Moving forward, when all the peices fall into place and your Linux distribution of choice is at the right level of comfort for you, we won't even have this discussion.

So relax; let the people developing this great system do their thing. When the state of the system is right for you, you'll know it. It'll happen, and until then do yourself a favor and don't worry about it.

Quote from you: " Not to mention that that this is the whole reason why linux will never be a mainstream desktop operating system..."

You really should add "today." at the end of that. Tomorrow, who knows?

Getting help from Linux gurus

But god forbid I ask a question on IRC or anywhere that someone knows anything about linux.

As has been explained countless times in many places, you have to be adversarial if you want your question to be answered on a Linux board.
You don't ask a question directly; rather, you write something like "Linux sucks because it can't do X but Windows can.".

To use your USB mouse example, you probably went on a board or IRC somewhere and wrote:

I can't get my XYZ brand USB mouse to work.

Can someone tell me what modules I have to load and what settings I have to make in the config file?
Thanks.

Note that you asked a reasonable question and thanked people in advance for their help.
This is a recipe for disaster.
The board gurus will pounce on you like a ... like a ... ah, like a board guru on a newbie, responding with comments like "RTFA n00b!" or "Go back to Windows if you can't be bothered to learn the simplest basics about Linux" or other equally-informative messages of encouragement.
Instead, you should have written something like:

It's too bad that Linux is still stuck in the 20th century.

It doesn't even support a USB mouse.
In Windows, I can just plug it in.
Until Linux can support modern hardware, it will always be playing catch-up to Windows.
It's definitely not "ready for the desktop".

You will have Linux gurus crawling out of the woodwork to show you that, yes, Linux does support a USB mouse, and the reason you couldn't get it to work was probably one of the following: X, Y, or Z, and here is how to work around or fix the problem, and here is where you can find additional information, and here is where you can get drivers or other needed software, or a more user-friendly front end, etc., etc.
Note that their attitude will be as snotty (or snottier) as with the nice method of asking, but you will get the information that you require.

Note to mods: The above may appear to be flamebait or an attempt at humor, but this method actually works.
Try it!

Re:Several frustrating points

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

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:You guys should maybe step back...

I've worked with a couple of MCSEs who weren't morons. Of course, they were Solaris sysadmins who'd got the MCSE as a requirement for some job or other they'd been involved in, but still ...

One of them said he'd had _enormous_ trouble with the MCSE tests, until he figured out the "correct" answers to the questions wasn't the right answer that'd actually solve the problem, it was the answer you'd been taught on the MCSE course.

KSpaceDuel

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

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

I'll make you a deal; you go back to reading comics and the rest of us will continue to use UNIX. Let me point out your mistakes, as they are many.

No decent scripting language? In Unix?

In UNIX, sure. Show me the default scripting language in UNIX v6. Bourne Shell is the closest thing you get.

/etc is ugly?

Yes. It literally means "etcetera". It is intended to hold all the junk that didn't fit anywhere else. It was a sloppy solution; instead of finding a place for all those scripts, binaries and conifguration files they all get dumped in /etc. With different file formats.

Oh and you're the only one talking about the Window registry.

How is message passing IPC better than sockets or shared memory or named pipes?

1) The sending and recieving process don't need to know about each other before hand 2) You can easily broadcast events to all listeners 3) Much easier to send arbitary data 4) Much easier to manage; no need to mess with sockets APIs 5) Much safer; no need to share memory between process.

ACLs are coming, but I believe that POSIX permissions make privilege management very simple, very straightforward, and very effective. ACLs may provide finer-grained permissions, but nothing that cannot be done via groups and permissions.

You can believe what you like about POSIX permisions but those of us who have to deal with big systems know that they suck. They suck big, coarse grained, poorly thought out rocks through straws. The are very simple, very straighforward, but that makes them useless for proper security because they're too simple. If you think that ACL's have no advantage over POSIX permisions you're wrong a second time on this.

The SUID is still a horrible solution, and come to that so is the "All or nothing" attitude of the All Mighty UID 0. ACL's solve all of that.

Re:Several frustrating points

> 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

Re:Several frustrating points

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

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

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

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.