The Land Before Linux: Let's talk about the Unix desktops
- Reference: 1706358787
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/01/27/opinion_column/
- Source link:
Way back in 1993, I oversaw a PC Magazine [1]feature review on Unix desktops . Yes, that's right, before I was a Linux desktop user, I was a Unix user. Indeed, I've been a Unix fan since 1979, when [2]2BSD Unix arrived on the scene. But by 1993, numerous Unix desktops had appeared, and I talked the magazine into letting me kick their tires.
My team and I reviewed Unix distros from Consensys, Dell, Interactive Unix, SCO, Univel, Sun, and NeXT. We also looked at but didn't review Unixes from UHC, Microport, and other companies. I guarantee many of you have ever heard of them.
[3]
What about Linux? Yes, it was around, and I was already using it. But the state-of-the-art Linux distro was [4]Softlanding Linux System (SLS) , and I couldn't convince my editors – or myself, for that matter – that it was reviewable. The first version that I would have reviewed, [5]Slackware , which is still with us today – was still months in the future.
[6]
[7]
Today, only Dell is still with us, and it's not certainly in business now because of its System V Release 4 (SVR4) Unix release. However, one of those early Unix desktops is still alive, well, and running in about [8]one in four desktops .
That operating system, of course, is macOS X, the direct descendent of [9]NeXT's NeXTSTEP . You could argue that macOS, based on the multi-threaded, [10]multi-processing microkernel operating system Mach , [11]BSD Unix , and the [12]open source Darwin , is the most successful of all Unix operating systems.
[13]
It sure didn't look that way at the time. It wasn't that Windows was better than Unix. In 1993, Unix's competition, if you can call it that, was Windows 3.1 and NT 3.1.
[14]NT , in particular, at that point, was a bad joke of a server operating system. NT only started to matter with the Windows NT 3.5 release.
There are many reasons Windows beat Unix. Not least of these was that Microsoft made sure hardware and software vendors either played ball with Microsoft or didn't [15]get access to Windows or Microsoft Office.
[16]
That was an enormous deal at the time. Today, we think of Macs as being rivals or better than Windows PCs. That wasn't the case then. Steve Jobs had been fired, and in Apple's 1993 annual report, the company reported its [17]net income had fallen by 97 percent.
But, as important as its historically [18]underhanded business dealings were for its success, Microsoft didn't have to cheat to win. The Unix companies were doing a great job of killing themselves off.
You see, while there were many attempts to create software development standards for Unix, they were too general to do much good — for example [19]Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) — or they became mired in the business consortium fights between the Open Systems Foundation and Unix International, which became known as the [20]Unix wars .
While the Unix companies were busy ripping each other to shreds, Microsoft was smiling all the way to the bank. The core problem was that the Unix companies couldn't settle on software standards. Independent Software Vendors (ISV) had to write applications for each Unix platform. Each of these had only a minute desktop market share. It simply made no business sense for programmers to write one version of an application for SCO OpenDesktop (also known as OpenDeathtrap), another for NeXTStep, and still another one for SunOS.
Does that sound familiar? That kind of thing is still a problem for the Linux desktop, and it's why I'm a big fan of [21]Linux containerized desktop applications, such as Red Hat's Flatpak and Canonical's Snap.
By the time the two sides finally made peace by joining forces in [22]The Open Group in 1996, it was too late. Unix was crowded out on the conventional desktop, and the workstation became pretty much a Sun Microsystems-only play.
So, how did Linux come to win? Well, it had two major advantages over the Unix distros. The first was that it was open source. In open source's meritocracy, the good code survives, and the bad code dies. In particular I credit Linux's use of the Gnu General Public License (GPL).
[23]Will Flatpak and Snap replace desktop Linux native apps?
[24]The rise and fall of the standard user interface
[25]Your pacemaker should be running open source software
[26]Bricking it: Do you actually own anything digital?
After all, if all it took for success were open source code, we'd all be running pure BSD operating systems such as [27]FreeBSD , [28]DragonflyBSD , and [29]GhostBSD . Instead, while the BSD Unix systems are still important, they have nothing like Linux's market share.
The reason for this, as David Wheeler, today the Linux Foundation's Director of Open Source Supply Chain Security, explained, was the BSD license has been troublesome because, every few years, someone says, " [30]Hey, let's start a company based on this BSD code! " … They pull the *BSD code in, and some of the best BSD developers, and write a proprietary derivative. But as a proprietary vendor, their fork becomes expensive to self-maintain, and eventually, the company founders. … Later, rinse, repeat.
"Meanwhile, the GPL has legally enforced a consortia on major commercial companies … [All] are contributing, and feel safe in doing so because the others are legally required to do the same. It's basically created a 'safe' zone of cooperation."
Linux's other killer advantage was it had Linus Torvalds. With Torvalds as Linux's single leader, it avoided the old Unix trap of in-fighting,
It's far more than Torvalds being a genius developer. Torvald's humorous title may be Benevolent Dictator for Life, but over the years, [31]Torvalds has learned to work and play well with others .
The stories go that Torvalds is something of a meanie, and it's certainly true that he doesn't suffer fools gladly, but I've been to many [32]Linux Plumbers meetings . There, I've seen him and the top Linux kernel developers work with each other without any drama. Today's Linux is a group effort.
If all Linux had was Torvalds, I'd worry about the operating system's future. Linus is a wonderful person and a great programmer, but if that's all there was to Linux's success, we'd be one [33]bus problem away from its end.
Instead, the Linux distributors and developers have learned their Unix history lessons.
They've realized that it takes more than open source; it takes open standards and consensus to make a successful desktop operating system.
We may never see the fabled "Year of the Linux Desktop," but Linux has already become a top end-user operating system, thanks to Android and Chrome OS. It took its own sweet time, but Unix, via Linux, finally has become a top end-user operating system. ®
Get our [34]Tech Resources
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=jMKfH6i9OcYC&pg=PA220&dq=Vaughan-Nichols&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi8pdG5gveDAxXhlmoFHSYsDdcQ6AF6BAgMEAI#v=onepage&q=Vaughan-Nichols&f=false
[2] https://opensource.fandom.com/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZbWLHCsy6rWQvqHIi9rXXAAAAYk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://archiveos.org/sls/
[5] http://www.slackware.com/
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZbWLHCsy6rWQvqHIi9rXXAAAAYk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZbWLHCsy6rWQvqHIi9rXXAAAAYk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-share-of-windows-7/
[9] https://www.zdnet.com/article/steve-jobs-the-next-years/
[10] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/KernelProgramming/Mach/Mach.html
[11] https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/explaining-bsd/
[12] https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu
[13] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZbWLHCsy6rWQvqHIi9rXXAAAAYk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/19/windows_nt_30_years_on/
[15] http://www.practical-tech.com/business/b020298.htm
[16] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZbWLHCsy6rWQvqHIi9rXXAAAAYk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[17] https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/15/business/company-reports-a-small-profit-for-apple-computer.html
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2000/04/04/judge_finds_against_ms/
[19] https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/POSIX-Portable-Operating-System-Interface
[20] https://klarasystems.com/articles/unix-wars-the-battle-for-standards/
[21] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/09/will_flatpak_and_snap_replace/
[22] https://www.opengroup.org/membership/forums/platform/unix
[23] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/09/will_flatpak_and_snap_replace/
[24] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/24/rise_and_fall_of_cua/
[25] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/12/column/
[26] https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/22/opinion_column/
[27] https://www.freebsd.org/
[28] https://www.dragonflybsd.org/
[29] https://ghostbsd.org/
[30] https://lwn.net/Articles/197875/
[31] https://www.theregister.com/2018/10/22/linus_torvalds_back/
[32] https://lpc.events/
[33] https://deviq.com/terms/bus-factor/
[34] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Software vendors either played ball with Microsoft
....and there's the eye-opening email from James Plamondon, two years later (in January 2000).
Famous for the rant entitled "Evangelism is War".
Enjoy: http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000/PX03096.pdf
Flatpak and Disk Space
Quote: "....a big fan of Linux containerized desktop applications, such as Red Hat's Flatpak...."
Well.....fine.....but just make sure that:
(1) There's PLENTY of room in /usr ......
(2) ....and if you remove a Flatpak, take care to manually remove all the HUGE unused software in /usr which the removal failed to remove.
Re: Flatpak and Disk Space
For real. I went to install a software package, wasn't paying attention, and inadvertently grabbed the Flatpak version, which weighed in at 2 GB compressed, 3.5 GB uncompressed. The same package in native deb format was less than 100 MB. That's one hell of a difference in both disk space and bandwidth!
Re: Flatpak and Disk Space
It's a valid complaint, but when, to pick a couple of real examples, the packages you want to download are current in Flathub and literally years out of date from the distro, I'll pick the Flatpak version every time. And given that I am currently spoiled with disk space (thank you manufacturers who briefly over-produced SSDs), I don't care about the extra file space.
Re: Flatpak and Disk Space
" the packages you want to download are current in Flathub and literally years out of date from the distro"
If the packages in the distro being old upsets you, pick a different distro.
Meet the New War....same as the Old War
While I observed from afar the Unix Wars while using at various jobs a NeXT box and various SGI boxen, I had to chuckle at the author's assertion that we are not seeing that in the Linux world as well as with his mentioning the containerization of Linux packages via Snap or Flatpak.
I mean....there are two. Three if you want to make a handwaving argument about App Image. So....three versions of containerization. Each incompatible with the other. Only one ( App Image ) is platform agnostic. That is to say that while you CAN use Flatpaks on Ubuntu you have to go twiddly fiddly with the command line for a while in order to set up Ubuntu to use Flatpaks as Ubuntu does NOT do that for you as they support their own in house containerization scheme namely Snaps. And the same holds true for Red Hat and Suse as they have native Flatpak support but you have to go twiddly fiddly with the command line for a while to setup for Canonical's Snap containerization scheme.
Now you might say...well...let me use App Image instead since it's platform agnostic. Well, you have to right click your App Image program icon in order to select "RUN" in order to lauch the program. Sorry....this is the 21st Century. Here is the process we have had since the original Apple Macintosh in 1984. Download program. An icon is place on the desktop of computer. Single or Double click the icon to launch. Only in the nerd land of Linux is it acceptable to force a user to learn how to launch a program all over again.
And let's not even discuss that before the Linux Wars of 3 different containerization schemes we had the Linux Wars of RPM's vs DEB's, and the continuing Linux Wars of DE's such as but not exhaustive as KDE, GNOME...( that's GNOME 2 vs GNOME 3 so a war inside of a war ), Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, LxQT....and the list could go on ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
Oh...right....ChromeOS DE from which the majority of Windows 11 DE was copied. And speaking of ChromeOS and Chromebooks, here is THE MOST successfull Linux desktop in history. And it can't even run Linux programs natively because it only uses the Linux kernel not the entire Linux desktop and userspace bits to make it a "real" Linux desktop. BUT....as Linux nerds will retort...YOU CAN RUN LINUX PROGRAMS IN A CONTAINER CALLED CROSTINI. And my reply is....LINUX WARS !!! Now we have 4 Linux container schemes. App Image, Snaps and Flatpaks which only run on actual Linux desktops. And the forth...Crostini...only running on Chromebooks because it actually isn't a Linux platform even though it uses the Linux kernel.
So....in the end....how are the Linux Wars of today any different from the Unix Wars of yesterday other than the closed source nature of Unix back in the day vs. the open source nature of Linux today?
Re: Meet the New War....same as the Old War
And it can't even run Linux programs natively because it only uses the Linux kernel
I take it you don't use a Chromebook? Despite all of your screaming that it's something else, running Linux apps is still as simple as Settings > Advanced > Developers > Linux Development Environment > On.
I taught an entire Linux programming course at a major university on my Chromebook. Because... It's Linux. Same commands, same package system, same apps.
Re: Meet the New War....same as the Old War
"Well, you have to right click your App Image program icon in order to select "RUN" in order to lauch the program."
@Jumbotron64
I just downloaded the Inkscape 1.3 appimage. One time only I had to right-click, select Properties and the Permissions tab, and tick the little box that said 'Allow this file to run as a program'. Then I can double-click the icon(*) and start Inkscape forever after.
Strikes me that some kind of user intervention should be needed before running a random downloaded file, but I think perhaps a popup 'set permission' box might be a good idea like on Winders.
* I prefer to make a simple inkscape.desktop file and stick it in ~/.local/share/applications/ myself so that the application appears in the menu and I can add a launcher - but that is probably too much 'twiddly twiddly' by your definition.
What Unix cost us
I just ran across [1]this video , and this comment thread seems like as good a place as any to share it.
[1] https://youtu.be/9-IWMbJXoLM
SCO on the laptop was my choice partly because I could run development versions of Informix products on it I could support clients running Informix on SCO servers. I never met Interactive as a desktop product but as Onix it provided my first Unix server; I believe they also ported the original Aix.
But let's look at "Does that [the Unix wars and need to compile multiple versions of applications*] sound familiar? That kind of thing is still a problem for the Linux desktop, and it's why I'm a big fan of Linux containerized desktop applications, such as Red Hat's Flatpak and Canonical's Snap."
Go and look at the download page for LibreOffice. At any time LO offers two versions for any platform, the leading edge and trailing edge versions. Check either of them. What options are offered for each version? For Linux there's 64-bit RPM and Deb. For Windows there's 64 and 32 bit. For Mac there's Intel and Apple silicon. That's right, there are no more versions offered for Linux than for Windows or Mac. Why is Linux considered to present more of a problem?
Now let's look at another staple on my desktop, Seamonkey. We have a choice of 64 and 32 bit Linux, 64 & 32 bit Windows and just x64 Mac with a choice of languages (it looks like macOS is the difficult one here, not Linux). They've even removed the RPM vs Deb choice because all that has to be done (and it's all the LO options automate for you) is copy the download over to /opt and extract it. The same method has been used for years for installing non-distro applications. What Flatpak and Snap are ostensibly solving is a non-problem, something that's never been a problem, a straw man. What they are very clearly doing is creating their own little walled gardens. What sounds familiar about them is that they're reviving the Unix wars for exactly the same reason the original wars were conducted - to conquer territory.
* In part the need to recompile was driven by multiple H/W architectures: DEC, HP, IBM, Intel, MIPS, SPARC, Zilog and various others. The only H/W choice at present is between 64 and, where it survives, 32 bit Intel** and Apple.
** And that itself is really an OS rather than a H/W choice.
With Torvalds as Linux's single leader, it avoided the old Unix trap of in-fighting,
Almost sounds like it was successful because it is proprietary...
Proprietary
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Re: Proprietary
An argument could be made that Torvalds is the proprietor of the Linux kernel.
Re: Proprietary
You can download the entire source code of the Linux kernel. You can tweak any bit of it you think needs tweaking to make your very own version, not Linus's, not anyone else's. Yours. You can compile your tweaked version (assuming it's still syntactically correct after your tweaks). When/if you've compiled it you can run in (assuming your tweaks didn't make it crash).
Try to repeat that for the Windows kernel.
Now do you understand what proprietary means?
Re: Proprietary
Now do you understand what proprietary means?
I do. Do you? It means that it has an owner, who has the right to decide what other people can, and cannot, do with it.
I was making the rather tongue in cheek point that, as the article points out, the Linux kernel is in good shape because Linus acts as a fairly strict owner who decides, proprietorially, what changes are allowed (often in very colourful language). The code may be freely available, but the official kernel effectively only gets the changes that Linus permits.
> but Linux has already become a top end-user operating system, thanks to Android and Chrome OS
Isn't Chrome OS still a tiny minority? Some schools were tricked into buying a fleet and a some elderly use it as a web browser thin client perhaps?
Saying that Android is providing Linux to the masses is very true but I personally find it a little bit... sad. I feel Linux can do so much better than that as a proper general purpose operating system. And this is wasted when misused as an over-engineered phone OS.
Not sure about the definition of "tiny", but certainly not enough. For the desktop market in 2023, Windows had about 70%, OS X about 20%, and Linux much of the the rest with roughly 1/3 Chrome OS and 2/3 Gnu. Perhaps a significant portion of Gnu is in a Windows Subsystem for Linux container, though.
Android works fine as a Linux that is the biggest seller of all in personal devices, but I truly miss and would love to see a revival of Nokia's Gnu Linux phones, the spiritual descendent of my late beloved N900 and the briefly sold but well-received N9 successor that Microsoft killed with a $1 billion check. But I'm probably just weird. *sigh*
Even Microsoft had a UNIX!
Don't forget Xenix - which was a System III. We did have one machine that ran it...
Personality, I cut my teeth on Edition VII then System V on Interdata/Perkin Elmer/Concurrent minis rather than desktops. Then Masscomp came into the fold with more desktops running RTU ((Real Time Unix) which was a System V / BSD blend as far as superstructure
Re: Even Microsoft had a UNIX!
No, Microsoft did NOT have a UNIX.
What Microsoft had was a license to sell leases of the bog-stock PDP11 UNIX Version 7 source. AT&T retained ownership. Other companies, such as SCO[0], did the porting.
[0] The real SCO, not the zombie SCO of insane litigation fame.
30 years on...same old same old
Back then we had about half a dozen major vendor propriety versions of Unix and another few dozen minor players. Mostly kinda compatible. Sort of. Now we have about half a dozen major distros of Linux and another few dozen minor distros. Mostly kinda compatible. Sort of.
Back then we had about half a dozen various windowing GUI's on Unix. None with dominant market share. Now we have about about half a dozen various windowing GUI's on Linux. None with dominant market share.
Back then Unix was a big player in the mini and specialized workstation market. Now Linux is a big player in the sever and specialized dev PC market.
As for embedded Linux. We had QNX etc back then.
And I did my first build from source of Minix in 1989. The year I first cracked open my copy of the Burgundy Book. For X-Windows.
Nothing has really changed.
Software vendors either played ball with Microsoft
“software vendors either played ball with Microsoft or didn't get access to Windows or Microsoft Office.
Feb 1998: [1]Who is Microsoft's Secret Power Broker?
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20050315043339/http://practical-tech.com/business/b020298.htm