Comfy Unix thread

I love using MATE with a Windows 95 theme.

nice cde theme

Everyone who thinks unix is comfy should read the unix hater's handbook.
You people need to be exposed to something else but unixlikes and NT.

>something else but unixlikes and NT
currently there are no available and usable desktop os that is not unixlike or NT
not
a
single
one
>inb4 someone memes templeos or bsd or some shit

“I liken starting one’s computing career with Unix, say as an undergraduate, to being born in East Africa. It is intolerably hot, your
body is covered with lice and flies, you are malnourished and you
suffer from numerous curable diseases. But, as far as young East
Africans can tell, this is simply the natural condition and they live
within it. By the time they find out differently, it is too late. They
already think that the writing of shell scripts is a natural act.”
— Ken Pier, Xerox PARC

TOPKEK

True, but as your own picture shows, it's not like people are using it for anything important at this point. It's just for dicking around with old tech.

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A majority of the complaints found in UHH seem to have to do with specific quirks that existed on the old UNIX systems used at the time of writing, and more than likely do not apply to modern implementations.
However, some of these quotes i've seen posted on imageboards don't make sense even within the context of the book's publication date of 1994.
>The lesson I just learned is: When developing with Make on 2 different machines, make sure their clocks do not differ by more than one minute.
The Network Time Protocol, otherwise known as NTP, has existed in some form since at least 1985: 9 years before the book. In fact, NTPv3 was out 2 years before publication, so it had already had multiple revisions.
>The big ones are grep(1) and sort(1). Their "silent truncation" have introduced the most heinous of subtle bugs in shell script database programs.
SQL has existed since 1974: 20 years before the book, and the first commercially available RDBMS, Oracle, was released in 1979. Judging from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_relational_database_management_systems there have been 25+, maybe even 30+ relational database programs that existed prior to the publishing of the Unix Haters Handbook.
>Raise your hand if you remember when file systems had version numbers.
you mean like ext2 (1 year before publishing), ext3, and ext4?
To be a bit more serious though, yes it is true that Unix and Unix-like operating systems don't have separate version numbers for the filesystems, preferring to tie them to kernel versions. Why is this a problem again? Because it's not how Multics or Lisp or whatever used to do it? This isn't even a monolithic vs. microkernel argument, as even the microkernel OSes don't seem to bother putting version numbers for filesystems. And why should they?

But that is exactly why.
Even at the time of its beginnings unix was walking backwards in the development of operating systems. It's left computing in a kind of dark age.
There were and there are fundamentally better systems, but that they don't have web browsers means that no one uses or develops for them.

The shell is an especially stupid part of what makes a unixlike system.
That it expands * in the shell rather than in a shared library used by all programs means that you can't do mv *.a *.b and expect it to work, while in MSDOS you can.
That the only way to compose programs from small utilities is by unix pipes means that your IPC is based on binary streams rather than program objects. Unix has multiple small programming languages like awk just to work around the limitations of character streams.

The first point is a criticism on make. Should make really expect you to run NTPD on every development machine?
The second point is a criticism of the weakness on the combination of unix 'philosophy' of 'everything is a buffer containing text' and the tools the system provides. Suppose you have a configuration file for something like sendmail and want to do a grep | sort on it. You can't keep the configuration file in a relational database, the solution is simply inappropriate in some use cases.
The last point is about versioning filesystems, not file system versions. A versioning filesystem keeps older versions of files like git would, but does so in a transparent way. On the ITS system that was the first to implement a versioning filesystem, you could edit a specific older file version, and on writing increment the version of the file so you could keep the old ones around in case you needed them later. As it happens, a versioning filesystem makes it impossible to accidentally delete or overwrite a file entirely. It's like if every file on your system was snapshotted automatically on every edit.

kek

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But you're right that a lot of the issues laid out in that book have vanished. What happened can be seen in :
The GNU system, and linux as one of its kernels, saved what was salvageable of the unix situation the computing world was in. If you read the book, you'll see that it has zero criticism against GNU. It even raises GCC as an example of a proper C compiler, because its parser is implemented by YACC so it doesn't dumb core and die when it encounters an issue.
The GNU system is a MIT-style reimplementation of unix, as in, it's done correctly. It's more or less usable, but you still need to send your terminfo to a remote host for your ssh session to work because terminal device drivers never made it to the unix kernel.

This sort of stuff would simply not happen on a system with a versioning filesystem.
It's a user error, sure, but that it's so easy to nuke everything is an obvious design failure on the core of the system.
Like, you actually need physical backups to recover from a software fuckup now.

>hurrrrr no modrn SYSTRM IM RETARDED HURR
Look up Rob Pike's talk and document on the death of Systems Research.
Also:
static.loomcom.com/genera/genera-install.html
Here, run a Lisp Machine OS. Marvel in it.

that's just a virtual machine running under ubuntu
does not count

I see, you're a goddamn imbecile. I'm sorry for ever bothering you. I'm calling your wrangler over.
I wonder how he feels now when not a single student comes out knowing anything other than UNIX

I'm using Solaris at work right now

>tfw i love 90's UNIX UIs so i install window maker but it doesn't support SVG icons and SDL apps break it

BROOOOO I remember playing Doom and Mekton on this shit when I was a kid. Good times. They don't make em like they used to.

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>SDL apps break it
?
I use Window Maker pretty regularly, what's up with SDL programs?

shame about SVG icons, but you could reasonably run a script to convert them en masse to the desired size

I think it's mostly a SDL1 problem. Some icons just get stuck there and if you try to dock them you can't remove them.

Weird. I haven't had that issue, so I can't help.
Try reporting it to 'em, it actually does get updated still.
or better yet, try a more recent release if you installed it through your distro, because again, it does actually get updated (current release is 0.95.8 from 2017)

actually, reading the recent changelog, it even supports SVG if compiled with imagemagick too

That's odd, I was using the Arch AUR package. That's the latest one. However, it seems like there's another one that ends with -crm-git which looks like it's built with libmagick.

>Look up Rob Pike's talk and document on the death of Systems Research.
interesting read (not that user btw)
but the takeaway I've had after reading it seems to be that it's dead because it really doesn't matter that much, in the same way that there's probably a better way to make a lightbulb socket, but no one's really bothered because of all the existing infrastructure and bulbs
It's literally the fact that "good is the enemy of better," and we're already pretty good.

>hurrrrr no modrn
really, I'd use 9front day to day if I had any option
but having to VNC into another machine running Linux or something just to watch a video or use a web browser that can open any of the sites I use is basically unworkable and kind of defeats many of the reasons I have to even use the computer (IIRC, 9front actually does have virtualization support, so you don't need another machine now, but still) -- computing is a medium to do shit with, rather than an end goal of itself

and Linux has subsumed a bunch of shit that something like Plan 9 does anyway (poorly, less elegantly, and in a less integrated or basic way -- but it's there)

stuff doesn't get popular because it's good
it takes company backing for most tech to break into majority marketshare

what image viewer is that?

I bet you like store brand soda too
What distro do you run WindowMaker with?

I used Arch. I actually see the icons now. I had tried it in Slackware where it didn't work either when I realized that imagemagick is turned off in the SlackBuild for some reason. Still doesn't fix the wildy inconsistent behavior for the dock icons. It doesn't play very nicely with newer programs.

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.

There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.

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Gotcha; I'm pretty green so I had only tried it in WindowMaker Live. I looked at it like a poorman's NeXTSTEP that will run on anything. I did use the ancient, built-in icons for everything intentionally, but dock behavior is a little bizarre no matter what.

herpolhode.com/rob/ugly.pdf
this one's also an interesting read

it's a bit dated, and his discussion of security is just casually wrong (weak security that's easy to use is dramatically worse than good security that's hard to use -- if it's weak, it's basically just obfuscation, not protection)
but loads of it is still relevant

You idiots shit up every thread

every time I see this pasta, I'm reminded that Stallman doesn't know that an OS is, nor does he realize that Linux programs can and do exist without dependence on gcc, glibc, or the GNU tool chain

like, I've built binaries on "GNU/Linux" and run them on Android, entirely free from GNU shit and vice-versa
many programs depend on various Linux kernel features and interfaces and can thus be considered "Linux" programs, but don't actually care about the userland and libc one bit

A bare Linux kernel also provides enough functionality to be an OS -- you can reasonably pass whatever program you want to run as the init program.
Shells and the lot run on an OS, but they are not the OS itself as Stallman would say.

That heeb needs oven therapy.

Writing programs only using raw syscalls is not practical. Running your email client or web browser as init is not practical.

GNU is a general purpose OS with many features that happens to have Linux as its kernel, hence GNU/Linux. Stuff like Android is obviously not GNU.

>BSD
>not Unix-like
Jow Forums...

I don't run an operating system called GNU. I run an operating system called (Ubuntu/Fedora/Arch/Gentoo/whatever) that happens to use Linux, tools which may include some from the GNU project, and many other things besides. GNU is neither essential nor sufficient to make up a full operating system based on the Linux kernel.

I love the look of CDE. Takes me back to the ultra-sparcs we used in undergrad and grad school.
The closest I can get is XFCE to mimic the look.

CDE has been libre since 2012, it's on Linux

>There were and are fundamentally better systems
such as?

What even is GNU?

IRIX? How did you get access to an SGI workstation as a child?

>That it expands * in the shell rather than in a shared library
it happens in the shell because they (probably correctly even) assumed most individual programs wouldn't bother to actually handle them properly
so, having them done in the shell moves the burden away from every program knowing what to do with wildcards to just the shell needing to know

literally just press the spacebar on an image in the file browser

Why should I call an OS by the compiler it's built on? Windows has GCC available for it. Does that make it GNU/Windows?

>Now that Linux and (to a lesser extent) BSD have more or less taken over the world

Seriously, what brand of crack are you smokin'?

All of those use many GNU components

A lot of things. However, Linux is a kernel.

Cygwin is a compatibility layer that allows running GNU on windows

OP may enjoy these few piccies

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oops forgot link
wickensonline.co.uk/rc2012sc/2012/07/04/sun-ultra-5/

All of the markets that used to use proprietary Unixes have switched to Linux/BSD. There are a few holdouts for legacy reasons, but proprietary Unix is essentially dead apart from macOS.

Maybe his family took a decommissioned one home? My first computer was a Sun Ultra 5, got it exactly that way.