Do we need an alternative to Unix?

Lots of operating systems have been following the Unix way of doing things while some people complain about it, saying it's old and need to be changed. Is this complaint genuine or just faggotry? Is there a system with REALLY good features that would put Unix aside?

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I hear the NT kernel is pretty popular

>some people complain about it, saying it's old and need to be changed.
Old doesn't mean bad. If those people want a new philosophy it needs to be better than Unix and so far it hasn't materialized.
>Is there a system with REALLY good features that would put Unix aside
Everything is a file ensures that transparency. Anyone can operate their own computer how they like if everything is a file. There is only one reason to make files obscure and that is so things will be done your way. That is a bad philosophy for the user. Unfortunately a lot Redhat sponsored projects do exactly that. See Gnome3 and Systemd.

We need to go to the cloud!
Make cloud kernel someone!

If it's not a file, what is it?

bloat

Most of the good things that can't be done in pure POSIX have already been done in Linux, with some userland on top. About the only things I wish GNU/Linux had were device nodes for NICs (or at least bash/zsh consistently being built with /dev/tcp) and /dev/screenN for Wayland, as well as a way to better mimic NT peripheral handling for video games.

Gnome3 is making files obscure? Why are they doing that?

I have no idea what they mean. Maybe removing desktop icons?

They want to sell a brand like Apple. That has been their goal since Gnome3 was in development stage. They don't want you to tweak anything. When someone sees your screen Gnome devs what them to say "Oh, that's Gnome. I've seen that before"

i'm actually implementing a tcp/ip stack in a toy kernel right now, and have been considering implementing exactly this. expose the actual ports as device nodes, then have a kernel process talk to them with ioctls or something to do network stuff, and read/write to fetch or push packets from or to the card's rx/tx queues. what are your thoughts on this?

I think it would be cool if you made it work with local sockets or named pipes to reduce overhead on writing a bunch of small things to an fd. Also consider a shell filter to translate packet captures to text (wireshark/tshark alike) so you can tail -f a NIC, pipe it through that tool, and get decent output.

Damn. Is there no way to bypass that? I lile the look of gnome3, but it’s bs that I can’t change the look and feel that they want.

They haven't succeeded yet, but they're bitching about it. IIRC they want to kill GNOME Shell themes as well as Gtk themes, but they've been getting pushback for years.

How about:
Everything is an RGB!?

GNOME tweaks?

Not same guy but:
You can but more and more just at source level. They removed most of the plugin related systems and tweaks. Also, the functionality of themes is reduced and many ‘universal’ protocols for eg tray icons are replaced with their own, more limited, frameworks

Nobody uses unix anymore, GNU/Linux is where it's at.

'A function' you idiot.

Everything is a URL

RedoxOS was doing something along those lines.

Something that could have been improved in unix is that unix says you could use text as communication since it's an universal interface, however if you want to output multiple values you dont have any standard way to format the text in such a way that you can have spaces and newlines and other non-binary characters. You could use a json library but then it's not built-in and you require much more code than if unix had a standard way to do it & shell syntax. You could for example communicate between programs in binary and do it easily that way, but then it becomes an issue if you want to communicate with scripting languages such as the shell or python

>You could use a json library
man jq

I think it would be really healthy if someone with a lot of money invested in Haiku. It's a very interesting concept, basically perfect for the desktop in ways that Linux never will be. It's just held back by the OS being in copyright limbo and having to be reimplemented. With some TLC, it could become an awesome OS.

jq is for reading json... it's not much different from using a json library. Unix should have a simple way to construct structures and communicate them between programs in the same way as piping

never liked haiku. why do you think it's good?

GNU ofc, are you from the 70s?

It does away with the POSIX religion and also the X window system is not involved at all. Instead of a rather unweildy client/server graphical subsystem the graphics are built into the kernel. Boots much faster and the system is much simpler. For Linux-based operating systrems, Wayland offers a glimpse of something like that, but it's still going to be built for "UNIX".

Alas, once you get to the graphics of Haiku you find that there's not much that you can do in terms of proprietary and free software, a meager amount has been ported but Haiku is definitely an also-ran. Again it could be great, just needs time and money and developer time.

>POSIX
>religion
the only reason it's kept around is because people needed compatibility with older programs

thanks, user.

Agree that beos had potential, and was comfy back in the day -- but Haiku feels like it's being held back by a slavish desire for backcompat with beos that no-one except a miniscule number of diehards care about..

>Unix should have a simple way to construct structures and communicate them between programs in the same way as piping
Piping works with arbitrary data, text is just a convention simply because all programming languages can readily interface with it. Tell me what should happen if the program expects one of the many alternatives to json?

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> Tell me what should happen if the program expects one of the many alternatives to json?
The same thing that happens when a program gets unexpected text as input. Either the program can handle all text or not. If there was a built-in standard in unix then you wouldn't have to think if it's json or another format, you would just think it's a unix data structure

the NT kernel follows the unix philosophy in a lot of ways, including the everything is a file philosophy

>If there was a built-in standard in unix
There is, it's called byte streams.

so i see you're running gnome. y'know I'm actually on kde myself. I know this DE is supposed to be better, but... y'know what they say; old habits, they die hard.

Haiku (and BeOS) are object-oriented junk. Wayland isn't "unixy" aside from using sockets and shared memory, both of which are supported on Haiku.

Worst show ever
Worst quote ever

>Is there no way to bypass that?
You can always install a different environment. I mean, I don't know why anyone would use Gnome3 in the first place.

Read my first post. I said a format that works with scripting languages as well (shell, python) easily. Not using hex format string \x20\x30 shit. Also it's very error prone and hard to debug. This could be done as easily as text communication if it was built into unix

everything is data! Turing's time is over! I wonder if you even know what you're asking.

start with "computer is a a tool to solve problems" and work backwards from there and you will quickly see a linux pattern is simply 1 approach to this. It's an approach that happens to work very well compared to a lot of other alternatives.

>This could be done as easily as text communication if it was built into unix
Why should Unix care about your data structure? You can easily create a powershell version of the coreutils right now. The reason text is easy is because everyone can parse it without needing to include a library in their code and this is not Unix's fault.

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Object formats change. Byte streams are eternal. Tools written in a standard-object-format world like .NET or the JVM often suffer explosive parser failure or the dependency graph going quadratic to parse things you can do in one line of unix shell.

We already have RedoxOS.
POSIX compliant where everything is a URL.

normal people don't know what files are

Normal people barely remember to breathe. They shouldn't be allowed to use computers.

based

there is: piping

from that moment it was another shit show, who cares about DE its such a useless subject to even be related

No, it's just a bunch of jealous fuckwits who can't stand the fact that the perfect OS was invented long ago and can't be improved on.

so every process is a file?
video, audio subsystem is file?
tar to videocard output please (non-text).

i just hate that a lot of features plan9 and other os' like templeos innovate rarely come to a popular os because of their monolithic designs and glacial pacing.