@flockofnazguls first, the writing is grandiloquent and buries the lede. In fact I never found it before I lost interest. What is the thesis and when is it made?
Second, the author’s credibility is strained deeply when they apply the descriptor “famous(ly)” to HURD. More people have nuclear launch clearance than have successfully installed HURD.
but, with HURD, much like the Sex Pistols’ gig at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976 in which it is estimated only had 40 people attending, it is way more famous than the actual attendance/user base. 🙂
..says someone who was reading comp.os.minix in 1991 and saw Linus's first post..
The theme is "Linux (and everything else) sucks because it is not the same as the good old days."
I am not a computer scientist, but it seems to me that, perhaps, an OS that run everything from a Raspberry Pi to a supercomputer has had to adapt a little and not all the adaptations will fit a philosophical model from the 70s.
I'm running Neon. Started with Plasma on Kubuntu at least 5 years ago, maybe more (time flies now). I don't put any great strains on a computer and rarely have an issue.
@MylesRyden@flockofnazguls yeah I just did my first bare metal Linux install since osx came out (2001?) and was pretty pleased.
Did a Debian core only install and built out a “focused developer” build: tmux, vim, some languages, and then Wayland + sway + browser/pdf reader.
It runs great on old hardware and documentation wasn’t awful. ChatGPT has invested a lot of stuff too so crawling dozens of shitty forums is avoidable too.
@sgharms@flockofnazguls agreed, it seemed to take us through all of Unix history before spending the last couple of paragraphs on “Wayland is bad” - partially because it’s Linux only and partly as it has a complicated API not based on file handles. But does this without acknowledging X11’s history either? 🤷
@flockofnazguls I don't see how the author makes the leap from "modernizing the Linux graphics stack" => "everything (in the new stack) is meant to be a file". Wayland addresses a bunch of issues that emerged from X over many years - but the main page of the project doesn't talk about Unix or Linux even once, and I doubt many "Wayland evangelists" care about whether it's a "Unix tool" or not. Article lacks compelling reasons to access Wayland objects and attributes as pseudo-files.
@flockofnazguls jumping ahead of the article to what I assume we're going to get into - I've heard some very conflicting opinions about Plan9 and Inferno's "everything is a file" model and how well it works for graphics etc. I hope this series goes into things in enough depth to provide some insight and not just the "pro-files" version - there's overheads to file-based metaphors that we probably need to discuss in the context of things that need low-latency.
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