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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

"I think that if you took a Unix user from the early 1990s and dropped them into a 2022 Unix system via SSH, they wouldn't find much that was majorly different in the experience."

I agree. In fact, since there's fewer actively used unix variants, the same job would seem simpler in many ways. I think the fragmentation of tech above the OS would be much more intimidating. So many more languages, build+deploy systems, frameworks, things like api gateways, caching platforms, load balancers, and so on. In the 1990's an admin could maintain a decent amount of personal knowledge about what a developer might be doing on the platform.

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In my early 20s I was a Linux sysadmin contractor in the Midwest US and got dropped into a job site where the core team was being offshored. I had to quickly learn how to maintain HPUX, AIX and some Solaris boxes using docs in the form of word docs scattered across network drives. These old admins hated Linux… and I hated the unfamiliarity of the non-Linux systems. How could anyone live with a shell where tab completion wasn’t a feature? Gag!

You couldn't count on emacs being available on some random Unix system. Bad times, those were.

You still can't.. many (most?) mainstream distros don't ship vim or emacs by default.

Emacs, sure, but I've yet to find a distro without at least vim

You'll find smaller editors like nano or nvi installed by default more often than vim.

Fedora made nano default in 2020: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/UseNanoByDefault

Oh, you, IBM.

I'm more of an

  $ apt remove --purge nano > /dev/null

man myself.

the bare minimum at one point was just ed(1), the line editor. vi (without the m) wasn't a guarantee. I had an all-purpose cshrc that added /usr/ucb because vi was installed there on some systems, along with other BSD programs

What does /usr even mean?

As I understand it, historically, it was the tree for user home directories. The two main designers, `dmr` and `ken`, built tools in their home directories under there and shared stuff from there.

Then they ran out of space and needed to spill over onto another drive, so home directories got moved to `/home`.

Unix Shared Resources, if I recall correctly.

Unfortunately many distros aren't even shipping ed anymore.

NixOS

Same here. It was called "vi" and not "vim" as I recall, but it was always there.

Have you used Ubuntu or Fedora? Both default to nano.

IIRC Ubuntu atleast comes with vi, but vi != vim.

I feel the same way today when I can't tab complete parameter or variable names in typical unix shells.

As someone who used to administer solaris, sunos, hpux, and aix boxes, i can almost guarantee that the first thing they'd say is "What the fuck is up with this systemd shit?" Because i say that all the time.

systemd was necessary. In fact, Solaris did it first in the form of SMF.

> systemd was necessary. In fact, Solaris did it first in the form of SMF.

Apple's Unix variant seems fine without it though ... Of course macOS uses launchd [0] which I guess is somewhat similar. And if I am not mistaken it's released under a permissive license.

Perhaps Linux could benefit from using launchd instead of systemd?

---

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launchd

macOS includes launchd, because it is in fact necessary.

This doesn't make sense to me, twice:

1) the presence of launchd doesn't make systemd necessary

2) the previous absence of anything like systemd on Linux distros means I don't know what you mean by "necessary"

> Of course macOS uses launchd [0] which I guess is somewhat similar.

It isn't. Systemd has dependencies and many directives to express them. Launchd doesn't, and instead demands that every service either waits for its dependencies by itself or crashes deliberately if they are not met - so the autorestart by means of its brute force eventually brings the system fully up.

Systemd started as a launchd clone actually.

UNIX is fundamentally dedicated to the proposition that there is nothing that you can or could wish to do on a multicore 64 bit ARM system with a massively parallel GPU subsystem with its own memory, solid state disks and a fibernet backbone, that fundamentally differs from a PDP11 with a teletype and some magnetic tape drives attached to it.

It's not entirely clear whether that proposition's actually true.

I think in particular when you look at things like the ability of that operating system abstraction to handle stuff like GPU accelerated computation (CUDA and the like) it's possible that the insistence that the only abstractions we need are processes, pipes, sockets and inodes starts feeling a little limiting.

Unless that UNIX happens to be Irix or NeXTSTEP/macOS, with their own view of the world beyond their UNIX roots.

UNIX/POSIX never went beyond the basic of CLI applications and server daemons.

Only to be deeply confused when ifconfig is missing...

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