[KellyCriterion]

-- Everyone knew flat was best but were stuck with 8086 crap.--

This! Thats one of the most interesting things to me: Actually very often in the IT-world, the worst competitor won the race while better solutions were known and available: Microsoft, Intel etc.

Esp. that MS won for decades while making mainly a very bad OS, though they have some good enterprise products.

How would the world look, if Unix/BSD would have won this race?

[JdeBP]

There was a Microsoft operating system for protected mode 80286 in 1983. It was Xenix 286; it was basically 7th Edition Unix without the branding; and it was touted as the multiuser operating system that MS-DOS would be the gateway to. How would the world look if Microsoft had won the race? (-:

[trollbridge]

A PC with DOS was cheaper than a PC with Xenix, let alone a typical Unix machine. Also much easier to learn to use.

Macs also existed but were expensive. The PC with DOS was both powerful and cheap.

[Ekaros]

I really wonder if Unix is best we can do. Or is it also worst? So in the end two of the worst options won. It did make sense back in time. But could it have been replaced with something better later?

[bux93]

Linux is only used as a kernel temporarily until GNU is finished.

[simiones]

You mean GNU Hurd, I guess.

[JdeBP]

The operating system was going to be called GNU.

Don't open this can of worms. (-: There were endless discussions of this in the 1990s. Years's worth.

Scroll down to the 'What Is the Hurd?' section of this announcement post from 1996 and pay particular attention to its first and last sentences. That's the allusion here.

* https://groups.google.com/g/gnu.announce/c/d0N2mLo5dxk/m/bDq...

[amiga386]

There have been some very nice OSes in the past (e.g. AmigaOS, BeOS, QNX, Plan 9) that all failed to the Wintel juggernaut. MacOS only just made it out alive.

I wouldn't say Unix itself is the best. It suffered a war between competing implementations pushing their own proprietary components. POSIX is the compromise.

But, ultimately, what is good about it today is not so much "Unix" (the proprietary OS from Bell Labs and its heritage), but specifically Linux and the BSDs. Why? Because they are actually open. They are freedom incarnate. You can add anything you like to them, today, without asking any permission. Not just their kernels, but their userlands too (Linux obviously varies by distro here). There's even a chance you can get your changes adopted upstream (unless it's GNOME), much more than you'd ever get from a proprietary company's OS.

So, while there's always room for improvement on the technical aspects of the OS, the social and political aspects of Linux and the BSDs make them the best we can achieve as a society.

[wewewedxfgdf]

>> two of the worst options won

What do you mean, which are the two? Sure, Windows is crappy by Linus and MacOS? They are both awesome.

[simiones]

There are many crappy design decisions in Unix, Posix, Linux, MacOS, that have been known and worked around for decades (see the Unix Hater's Handbook). One example would be async IO, which has been famously bad in Unix, and Linux alone has tried 2 different generations of solutions - with the newer one, io_uring, being suspiciously similar to Windows' decades old IOCP. Fork/exec is infamous as a needlessly complex process creation API, requiring huge effort in the kernel just to handle the most common case of simply launching a new process. The traditional Unix security paradigm of simple user based file permissions is extremely weak and has required numerous solutions on top to handle realistic security scenarios - e.g. to protect a user's files from being tampered in unexpected ways by a process launched by that user (SELinux, jails, namespaces, etc).

I agree that Windows is crappy, but that doesn't mean that Linux and MacOS aren't also crappy in their own ways (not to mention iOS, Android).

[KellyCriterion]

Especially the enshittification over the decades: All the bloat (XBog Game Icon on Win Server - really?), their update politics tangled with higher hardware specs for running the same stuff slower than before.

I do not understand how can one crash their own product/baby that way - and no, this must be Hanlors Razors: They are doing it with (sophisticated) intend, not by accident (or coincidence)

[PunchyHamster]

"Better" is not one dimensional scale

Adding more features to OS is for some use cases a benefit, for other it's a barrier. For one it might be less work to get what you want ,for other it might be more code between you and hardware that just slows it down

Unix-like simplicity is exactly that, for some use cases directness is a benefit, for others it means extra work to do on top to get what you want.

If you just want a house, getting a raw foundation to work with is a lot to build on top, you have to bring the rest of the walls up yourself.

But if you want exactly the house you want, getting entirely different house to start with and changing it is far more work than starting from simple foundation and building up.

Overall unix "here is relatively simple operating system that doesn't force you but needs some things to be built on top to hit your use case" probably IS the best abstraction, despise not being "best" at really anything. There is reason we build houses from concrete and wood, and not carbon fiber and titanium alloys

[wewewedxfgdf]

Being technically best has long been known to not be correlated to market success in the way that makes logical sense to technical people who feel confused about this.