| "do one thing and do it well" does not mean "intentionally only support one piece of hardware". If your do one thing is "offer a bootloader that works on your hardware" or "offer device detection and driver loading for all your devices" that is not somehow scope creep. It's the only sensible way to architect those things. Similarly, curl supporting both HTTP and HTTPS is not a violation of "do one thing and do it well" - if you fail to support at least those two protocols, you've built a shitty tool. It's best to consider "do one thing" in the context of "what does the user want the software to do". A web browser having lots of functionality baked in is not necessarily a violation of this principle if all of that functionality is used to solve one user problem (I want to view YouTube, or I want to use GMail). At that point, the factoring issue lies somewhere else - the definition of the web platform, etc. Systemd attempts to solve very many user problems all at once, with varying levels of success, and other software packages have solved one or two of them at once instead. In that case there is a clear way to separate the ones that probably apply the "unix philosophy" and the ones that obviously do not. The Linux kernel and related components themselves sort of violate this, but that's mostly a matter of necessity - super-modular microkernel designs have not worked out great in practice. However, it still is built around relatively narrowly-scoped drivers for individual devices or services, instead of massive Megadrivers that handle every component in your system. Your PC may have an Intel GPU integrated on the CPU die, but it's still using a separate video driver, and the video driver is probably separate from things like the compositor and the actual PnP layer beneath that detects what hardware you have. If you look at the average USB device in Windows' device manager (this is probably true in Linux as well but I don't know how to dump the data), you can see a given device like a mouse or a phone is actually split up into a bunch of sub-capabilities exposed by the device, and those can each have their own driver. Same thought process there. |