Linux becoming a Windows / OS X clone

66 点作者 ciprian_craciun超过 1 年前

27 条评论

linguae超过 1 年前

That was a thought-provoking article. Something that interests me is how software systems become more complex over time, gradually deviating from the vision the original developers had. I believe the modern Linux ecosystem (Linux kernel, systemd, dbus, Wayland, GNOME/KDE, etc.) is almost unrecognizable from the Unix ecosystem of 30 years ago, let alone the quintessential classic v6 and v7 Unix systems from Bell Labs. But it’s not just Linux. I think any system that isn’t guided by a “keeper of the vision” eventually becomes huge and complex, especially if it gets widespread use. For example, C++23 is far more than “C with classes.” Common Lisp is quite a beast compared to LISP 1.5. Think of how many features are in Microsoft Office, which has been developed for decades.I think there’s value in a system that technical users could understand from top to bottom. This is what attracts me to small systems like Minix, Scheme, and Standard ML, just to name a few. However, I’m curious about how the complexity of big systems can be tamed. A system that is hard to reason about even with the source code being accessible is more expensive to maintain and to modify.

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wkat4242超过 1 年前

I kinda agree, especially in terms of commercial involvement. There's just too much steering done in Linux by big companies. I think it's lost the grassroots aspect. It's all big business now. And general opinion seems to side with it, I've read a lot of comments siding with RedHat's narrative of CentOS (and recent spinoffs) users as 'freeloaders'. Protecting someone's revenue stream was never the idea behind Linux.Some people might say Linux has grown up but for me it's off-putting. I don't want my OS to be for everyone because my wishes are pretty different than most people's.I moved to FreeBSD for my desktop and I'm really happy for it. It's simple and has some unique insights like the ports collection, jails and ZFS as a true first class citizen. Of course to each their own and I'm glad for some Linux-driven initiatives like KDE. I'm happy some people like Linux and I still use it here and there too, like for premade docker containers.

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vincent-manis超过 1 年前

I'm with Andrew Tanenbaum, who said, “It is sometimes said [Unix] Version 7 was not only an improvement over all its predecessors, but also over all its successors.” I got my start with V6, and I understood it thoroughly. There are large parts of my current driver, Debian Bookworm, that I only vaguely understand. Now nobody is trying to prevent me from understanding them (hello, Microsoft and Apple!), but there is no actual roadmap to the system.So, yes, Debian is far more complicated than I need or want. I have pondered on building my personal Linux system, using say Alpine or Void Linux, but that is work that seems unnecessary to me. Better off just to use Debian as it is.And, by the way, this bloat isn't just due to the distros. I build Emacs from source, and you should see the bizarre dependency set it needs, many of which have nothing to do with anything I use Emacs for. I have both GTK and Qt libraries on my systems. TeX Live's distribution media would fill up 20 IBM 2314 disk storage devices (circa 1970), each containing 8 washing-machine-sized disk drives (plus a spare). Install an application, and you might find yourself installing (different versions of) Perl, Python, and/or Ruby. It goes on and on.I have felt for a long time that dependency management is one of the big unsolved problems of software engineering. It's not surprising that the resulting systems have the appearance (and texture) of big balls of mud.

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SushiHippie超过 1 年前

Maybe you don't know everything that happens in your gnu linux system, and I think that's okay (to some degree).But the difference to windows and macos is that you can know whats going on.With looking at the documentation, man pages, looking at the configuration files and maybe even reading source code. If you really want to know what exactly happens, you will know on a FOSS linux system.With the closed source systems like windows and macos, you'll probably never know 100% of whats going on.With linux you are also free to create an installation from scratch where you exactly know every piece because you wrote every configuration file for it etc. This is much work, but otherwise you will need to use magic (like the author described it) programs, which do most of the heavy lifting for you.

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bitsandboots超过 1 年前

Sometimes I feel like this author, but then consider it may just be me getting older and resisting learning something new. I've never become an initv nor systemd expert but over time I have gotten to a point where I don't think systemd is out to make my life difficult, though I do wish creating a service was easier since I never ever remember how to do it and where the documentation on the options are.But, I also think that modern OSs have somewhat outgrown their users. I'm not sure I actually need a multi-user OS, nor secure signing of various things. Though if I were to use Haiku and get what I asked for, maybe I'll get exploited and regret it somehow. Yet the likelihood seems so low versus the complexity involved to protect me.Anyway, for those who think Linux is growing to have more than needed, you'll always have the distros that refuse to change, like Slackware. But, I think saying the old linux was better is nostalgia, since Slackware really isn't fun to use.

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tech_ken超过 1 年前

An interesting read, I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint but I also feel like it's kind of an inevitable trend.> Granted there are other Linux distributions like Gentoo, Alpine, Void, NixOS, etc. that are still conservative in some of these regards... However, these are not the popular ones, thus not the ones where the most development effort goes into.Has this ever not been true of hardcore/transparent "Linux"? Yes Ubuntu is trying to be a free Windows-like, yes Gnome is pretty locked down. But alternatives still exist, it's just they're unpopular (and specifically for the reasons the author prefers them). Yes the big names get most of the development attention, but in terms of overall hours contributed are the smaller names actually getting less as an absolute number? Or just a percentage?> In fact, the overall dumbed-down and closed-up -- sorry I meant to say "optimized for the enjoyment of our customers" -- Apple OSX seems to be a better alternative...This seems to be meant as snark, but isn't this kind of the core tradeoff driving this whole dynamic? Sure simple and transparent software can be fun and useful, but much of the modern computing stack is simply too complicated to be genuinely transparent. Simplifying the bootloader won't make WebRTC simpler for an amateur to understand.

zjp超过 1 年前

We would all do well to remember we make things for users. The system is complex so that the user doesn't have to deal with it, and if we want Linux to get more than its current (pathetic) desktop market share, this is the way things will go. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink, and you can't make users care about this stuff when they just want to do their taxes, manage their businesses, talk to their friends, and look at their photos.

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Given_47超过 1 年前

Admittedly as a macOS lifer moving to linux I was a bit confused, or at least couldn’t resonate with the criticisms, specifically systemd (openrc), along with other random overhead and cruft.Then got to the part where they mentioned this is targeting more mainstream distros and thought “ah so this is why I chose gentoo.” I never considered any of the mentioned mainstream distros because I just assumed given the popularity, there’s more fuckery. Less granular control == more “user friendly” which seems like a natural byproduct of something becoming more popular.I certainly don’t have the historical perspective of the author, and one can can debate the merits of the myriad running processes, but just wanted to share the perspective of someone entirely green to Linux; that what was outlined was what I already assumed

snitty超过 1 年前

>The main reason I've switched to Linux was because it was an operating system that was so transparent, so (relatively) simple to debug and experiment with…>However, [Free/Open BSD] have shortcomings of their own, mainly being so conservative that they've almost been left behind by the overall open-source community.I feel like the author doesn't understand that these are connected…

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IshKebab超过 1 年前

I wish! It's got a long way to go still before it's as robust and easy to use as Mac and Windows. Systemd has certainly been the biggest improvement in that direction for a while though.

xorcist超过 1 年前

Here's a somewhat serious suggestion: SlackwareIt's a modern Linux, closely follows upstream projects, and when you wonder how to set up some network configuration or something else you just open the script in question and it's mostly obvious.It's a small community so hasn't got the same amount of eyeballs and might not always be as quick with security fixes as the bigger projects, but it might be a bit of stale, old, yet somehow fresh air for the author.

catlover76超过 1 年前

I am using Linux rn because my Windows computer is busted. On Windows, I was using WSL for development. It was amazing to have a good dev environment as well as a real computer at the same time!I can't even use my large MSI 1440p monitor with this computer because Linux (also perhaps because of the actual gfx card too, to be fair). I had to manually install Discord's update yesterday and now there are 2 Discord apps on my computer because Linux (and only one works).

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NoZebra120vClip超过 1 年前

In 1989, I became a Unix user because I was in college. I had been a DOS user, not much of an Apple fan, Commodore lover with a VIC-20 and C=64, and even an Atari BASIC user before that. I knew systems and I knew architecture, and I easily adapted to the CLI.I was immediately entranced by the simplicity and elegance of Unix. I got a sense of gigantic systems humming beneath (or above) the terminal room, because this was an OS capable of scaling massively. Yet it allowed the end-user to piece together simple building blocks, in shell scripts, pipelines, and C or Pascal programs.So I grew and adapted to Unix, and I lived through the heady proprietary days with Sun Microsystems, HP and DEC. Then I saw that bubble burst as Linux and the Wintel architecture supplanted them and dominated the market. I used all sorts of GUIs, from OpenWindows, CDE, Cygwin, etc.I ran Unix or Linux at home between 1991-2022. I loved to tinker! If a gearhead always has his hotrod up on blocks in the driveway, I always had the cover off my computer and I was poking it in some fashion. I loved to play with software and configuration, and play sysadmin to my home lab. Until a few years ago, this was OK.However, my days of tinkering came to an end. My days of wanting to self-host services ended. I became even more of an end-user than a Power User, and as of 3 years ago, I needed systems that work and are supported. I would tinker no longer.So I said farewell to Linux. Now don't get me wrong. I fully support Linux in all its forms, from Android to the data center to hyperscale supercomputers. I just don't find a space for Linux or Unix at home anymore. Thanks for all the lovely years.

nrivoli超过 1 年前

If you ever read windows internals, you’ll see that overall windows is surprisingly simple, the hidden-proprietary things like encryption/authentication/ads etc run on top of everything else.Linux and osx are as well still not complex at all, what have changed the most over the years are firmware/hardware and drivers and security related items like addition of sensors, IcS for encryption and etc that is indeed very opaque by nature.

frizlab超过 1 年前

OS X does not exist anymore, it’s macOS and has been for a long time now.

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animitronix超过 1 年前

That was painful. Dude clearly hates systems despite not wanting to be labeled a systemd hater. Wake me up when Linux decides not to work on systems without a TPM and we can talk then.

adamomada超过 1 年前

Apparently the author is aware of the alternative distros and even named a few of them, but their main issue is that they are not popular enough.But look which ones are the actual most popular distro as voted by People Who Choose Linux on DW <a href="https://distrowatch.com/dwres-mobile.php?resource=ranking" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://distrowatch.com/dwres-mobile.php?resource=ranking</a>Imho Void Linux is BSD With Linux kernel and the perfect option for the author

CoolCold超过 1 年前

I believe Lennart explained things well enough - being _end-user_ targeted means much more dynamic things vs servers targeted.> Hardware and Software Change Dynamically> Modern systems (especially general purpose OS) are highly dynamic in their configuration and use: they are mobile, different applications are started and stopped, different hardware added and removed again. An init system that is responsible for maintaining services needs to listen to hardware and software changes. It needs to dynamically start (and sometimes stop) services as they are needed to run a program or enable some hardware.<a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html</a>

cracauer超过 1 年前

The OP could solve most of those problems by switching back to FreeBSD.

nikolay超过 1 年前

Complex systems are less reliable, so, the author is right that by increasing complexity, Linux is becoming unstable like Windows... prior to Windows 11, which is great, to be honest.

prmoustache超过 1 年前

The title should be replaced by: author is getting old and grumpy.

grrandalf超过 1 年前

I agree with everything the author said. I could have written that. But having said that, I’d add this.I’m astounded at the customization that’s still possible. Gnome-tweaks still works on Ubuntu 23.04. I moved the activities bar to the bottom and merged it with the dock (some extension). I changed the fonts to Helvetic’s everywhere in the system ui — just gnome tweaks.Only annoyance was that I had to create a symlink to make the Firefox snap see the fonts I had installed.It’s pretty cool that hidpi even works. I now think things like dbus are intrinsic to the problem of IPC for GUIs.——I can see why snap exists. Its worth it to make it hard for a random ‘curl | sudo bash’ from breaking important programs.But yes it’s ridiculous that I can’t update Firefox snap while it’s still open. And that it won’t auto update if I just close Firefox after getting the pop up about needing an update and wait a few seconds. I’m optimistic that will happen.Even in 22.04 I could entirely disable the dock using the same tools to disable third-party extensions.——I’m a huge systemd hater. But I recently noticed it has something to run an arbitrary one-off program as a unit with all of the isolation/logging facilities that provides. It’s a pretty great from a tech perspective.So I’ve softened my criticism somewhat. :)——It’s amazing how compatible the various distributions still are.I’ve concluded these problems are not easy. The complexity in modern Linux is probably fine within a constant factor (analogy with time complexity — I’ll edit to clarify).If we didn’t have multiple daemons etc we would have a single giant “unified” system like systemd for gui also — like windows.—-Finally, I think if we really want a simple gui stack we need to:1. Get rid of graphical login and go back to VT login + startx.2. User switching by alt-ctrl-f2 + startx.3. Screen lock performed by actually logging out using the gui equivalent of tmux. (Jwz’s post linked here was educational.)——Thanks for reading so far. And THANK YOU Ubuntu and Red Hat for keeping the flame still burning.PS: one final pet peeve. Why the heck does Ubuntu think it’s ok to half-ass booting other OS’s? Was super impressed that Oracle Linux (RHEL clone) actually listed all my OS’s and booted all of them after install. My hat is off to you.

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oso2k超过 1 年前

This is all very adjacent to the suckless philosophy: <a href="https://suckless.org/philosophy/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://suckless.org/philosophy/</a> . I sometimes wish we had a reset button to figure out where we went wrong; though I’m not a fan of systemd, but it seems like it was even before that.

vore超过 1 年前

Apparently the author's interpretation of "Windows clone" is "I don't understand how the Linux boot process works".

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JohnFen超过 1 年前

This is what is moving me away from Linux. It's been a good run, but the more it becomes like Windows and such, the less appealing and useful it is to me. If I wanted to be using those types of operating systems, I'd just use them directly.

colinsane超过 1 年前

dbus, systemd: these become building blocks because they allow the software on top to be split into smaller, replacable and inspectable components. wayland offers the same thing in contrast to X11. the side effect to having two-thousand 5k LoC userspace projects instead of two-hundred 50k LoC projects -- the side effect of _making a system more inspectable_ -- is that the complexities are made more visible (the interfaces/boundaries are more plentiful).> Granted there are other Linux distributions like Gentoo, Alpine, Void, NixOS, etc. that are still conservative in some of these regards... However, these are not the popular ones, thus not the ones where the most development effort goes into.NixOS has _by far_ the most software packaged and the most packaging activity. moreover, postmarketOS is likely the most widely-deployed distro for FLOSS mobile phones, and it's a downstream of Alpine. so i just disagree with this statement. but back to the proliferation of userspace services/interfaces, because IMO that's what's enabled these frontiers:any project can ship a systemd service and/or a dbus file declaring which interfaces it implements. now your OS doesn't have to do anything special to connect the different components. your chat client announces "i'd like to speak to an <org.freedesktop.Notifications> implementation please", dbus says "oh, i've got a file here saying that dunst can do that for you, let me launch its service", and 100ms later a chat bubble notification hits your display.now you hear about a new notification handler, "SwayNotificationCenter". uninstall dunst, install SwayNC, and now the notifications have fancy inline replies, a panel that lets you mute specific applications, which you can open from the tray icon, and so on. actually, it's new enough software that your OS doesn't package it. so you write a PKGBUILD, or APKBUILD, or nix file for it. because the systemd/dbus descriptions are shipped by the package, your package script is all of 10 LoC. easy enough to open a PR against your distro for that, it takes all of 5 minutes for the maintainers to review something this small and standardized.now that it's in a distro, it gets more traction. your distro (or a relative of it) decides they'd like to make SwayNC the default notification daemon for their users. but they want it to be consistent with the rest of the desktop, so they'll have to theme it a bit. peeking at the dependencies, they see it uses gtk, so they launch it with `GTK_DEBUG=interactive swaync` to view the document tree and modify the component styles until it fits in. SwayNC didn't have to do anything special to do that, maybe their devs didn't even know that feature existed -- they got it for free just by using a standard toolkit.now i hope the author might understand why dbus/systemd/wayland are appealing to distros and packagers. there's a long chain between upstream/developer and downstream/user. i figure the author spends more time near the latter than the former. perhaps someday they'll experience the full cycle: maybe they'll find no music player meets their needs and decide to author their own, watch as it gets adopted into different downstreams without any action on their part, enjoy unexpected bug fixes and improvements that their users send back upstream, and walk away with a broader understanding of the different tradeoffs at play here.

BearhatBeer超过 1 年前

It's all gotten too complicated, clearly the direction of Linux is controlled by big companies who are mainly interested in the datacenter. I used OpenBSD because it's still Unix, it's not trying to become something it's not, or change itself to suit whoever pumps in the money.