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I can commiserate, I had the same feels of loss when Acorn closed down.

When I was a kid they held the same affection for me as some kind "nerd football" team that you'd support out of all reason. I used to think "if they'd have just done this then they would have won!". With hindsight, as an adult, that seems so sweetly, childishly naive; I was a funny kid. :D

It convinced me though that you shouldn't tie your dreams to someone else's commercial organisation unless you're a major shareholder.

The happy ending for me was that Gnu/Linux and Free software nicely filled the void in my heart. No one can take it from you and it's never "finished". Cheers Mr Stallman. (That's so naive of me; I must be a funny adult too. :D )




"The happy ending for me was that Gnu/Linux and Free software nicely filled the void in my heart."

How ironic, considering that exact same thing is the bane of my existence: for someone like me who skipped the primitive, clunky, derided PC and jumped straight onto Suns and SGI's, Linux and GNU are a terrible, utterly depressing regression compared to HP-UX, Solaris and IRIX. I lost all will to work on computers because of GNU and Linux. It's that terrible when I compare it to AmigaOS, HP-UX, Solaris or IRIX.


That's interesting to hear. Is there some particular feature that you miss? Would something like one of the BSD based OSs suit you better?


I miss tools which don't implement other tools within them (like GNU grep -r does).

I miss the fault management architecture.

I miss ZFS without having to jump through all kinds of hoops to get / filesystem on it.

I miss the no memory overcommit without having to jump through hoops to system engineer an image with it turned off.

I miss the advanced runtime linker which can check version dependencies.

I miss the brutal speed of Solaris on the same hardware when compared to Linux.

I miss the advanced features of SGI's inst(1M) and AT&T's SVR4 packaging.

I miss Solaris zones, especially the sparse zones, dearly.

I miss mdb.

I miss SMF.

I miss the strict adherence to standards.

I miss the working, reference implementations of NFS and fiberchannel.

I miss JumpStart™️ provisioning and Flash™️ compressed OS imaging technology.

I miss clustering software which isn't buggy as hell and which actually works.

I miss IPFilter.

I miss Crossbow, the network virtualization technology.

I miss the fanatical application and driver interfaces' backwards-compatibility.


You miss bare bones commands that haven't changed since the 90's?

Brutal speed of Solaris? Compared to what, SunOS 4.x? This article is a few years old but I doubt the situation has improved much: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=oracle_s...


Much has improved and illumos keeps getting better and faster: since 2005, no code which causes performance regressions was allowed into the Solaris codebase. Each speedup committed set the base higher. Nobody would be allowed to commit code which slowed the performance thereafter. Any case where GNU/Linux was faster was treated as priority 1 bug. Yes, a bug.

Implementing tools within other tools for convenience is stupid, as it kills modularity, which is the UNIX®️ philosophy: I don't need that kind of "convenience" since I know UNIX®️ and therefore which pipes to use to which commands to get the same effect. grep -r replaces find + xargs + grep and therefore goes against "do one thing and do it well" as well as against "design tools to interface with other tools". For example tar is a tape archiver, therefore it has no business implementing compression - that's what dedicated compressors like bzip2 or xz or 7z are for - they know best how to (de)compress and how to handle their own formats. Therefore, the GNU approach of convenience is stupid beyond retarded.


For someone accustomed to Solaris or Irix's good points, BSD is likely to feel even more archaic.




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