this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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80s programmers hated Unix, btw. Look up Unix Haters Handbook, it's a free and funny read
A lot of it was fair criticism at the time. Linux fixed some of what was wrong. Having a good
sudoconfig mostly resolves the problem of having one superuser account, and big, multiuser systems are a lot less common now, anyway. X's network transparency features aren't that useful in modern computing contexts, either, though I have found a few over the years.But mostly, it's because the landscape changed from a hundred Unix vendors vs a bunch of other OSen, to now where it's Windows vs Linux vs OSX. By that comparison, the two with Unix-derived history look well thought out.
(This also implies that NextStep was the one old Unix vendor that has survived in a meaningful way. I don't think anyone would have guessed that 30 years ago.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_UNIX-HATERS_Handbook
Didn't knew this. It has 360 pages, wow!
EDIT:
hehe
They also hated their local sysadmin. BOFH still holds up in a few key ways.
Thanks. I didn't know there was a real band called "The Pipi Pickers" and I might have lived on happily without that knowledge.
Good thing GNU's not Unix
Here we go
I prefer the MIT link, it's faster 😁
https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf
Unix does so many stupid things and we're still stuck with some of them. Especially the terminal section still applies today.