Guide for Beginners: The UNIX-HATERS Handbook

[wiak]

http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf
The UNIX-HATERS Handbook
"Modern Unix
is a catastrophe. It’s the “Un-Operating System”: unreliable,
unintuitive, unforgiving, unhelpful, and underpowered. Little is more frustrating than trying to force Unix to do something useful and nontrivial.
Modern Unix impedes progress in computer science, wastes billions of dollars, and destroys the common sense of many who seriously use it. An
exaggeration? You won’t think so after reading this book."

I mention the above book elsewhere and think it is worth bringing to the attention of all Linux beginners since the same applies:

viewtopic.php?p=29105#p29105

[geo_c]

@wiak, this is a great read!

[geo_c]

http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf
The UNIX-HATERS Handbook

I mention the above book elsewhere and think it is worth bringing to the attention of all Linux beginners since the same applies:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic. ... 105#p29105

So I read this and it sheds a lot of light on the difficulties of scripting. I, not having a coding background or any training, learning everything by reading man pages and arch-wiki's, can get easily frustrated with understanding syntax. Now I can see why. But it does raise some questions.

The book was written in 1994? I don't think they ever use the term linux, and so I'm assuming at that time we are talking about Unix "proper." Though now I can see that there really wasn't ever such a thing to begin with.

The history is interesting. As I had somehow held the belief that Unix was basically a dying operating environment, until linux sort of revived it. Reading this book it appears that not to be the case, and that academics at least broadly propagated Unix into the mid-nineties. I'm sure there are more complex business considerations, as to what companies actually held some kind of rights to it and whether they were profitable, etc.

I would have to assume that many of the issues examined in the Haters book have been worked out on one level or another 30 years later, and yet, I'm not so sure. I recently was configuring my urxvt, and it took me awhile to figure out that it could be done from Xdefaults, or Xresources, or some combination of both, and it seemed dicey as to what settings go where and which ones stick. Lo and behold, I find that very thing on the pages of this book.

There's also X, which now seems to be gradually yielding to Wayland. And so X, taking me quite awhile to understand, may never have been that good to begin with. Yet I can do so much on puppy-linux systems running X. Quite amazing. I would never trade it for mac or windows, but their downfall is entirely of a different nature I suppose.

One of my friends descibed the Big Three pc OS's to me this way: Apple is like a Volvo or a Mercedes. It's proprietary, not everyone is allowed to make replacement parts, it's expensive and you have to go to an authorized dealer if something breaks. Windows is like a Ford or Chevy, it's widely used, parts are readily available and just about anyone can manufacture them, anyone can work on them. Linux is like an old car, that you have to go the junk yard to get parts for, where Harry at the auto-salvage says, yeah I got a fuel-pump that might fit that, and then retro-fits it to your model.

Well there might some truth to that analogy after all.

[wiak]

The history is interesting. As I had somehow held the belief that Unix was basically a dying operating environment, until linux sort of revived it. Reading this book it appears that not to be the case, and that academics at least broadly propagated Unix into the mid-nineties. I'm sure there are more complex business considerations, as to what companies actually held some kind of rights to it and whether they were profitable, etc.

I would have to assume that many of the issues examined in the Haters book have been worked out on one level or another 30 years later, and yet, I'm not so sure. I recently was configuring my urxvt, and it took me awhile to figure out that it could be done from Xdefaults, or Xresources, or some combination of both, and it seemed dicey as to what settings go where and which ones stick. Lo and behold, I find that very thing on the pages of this book.
...
One of my friends descibed the Big Three pc OS's to me this way: Apple is like a Volvo or a Mercedes. It's proprietary, not everyone is allowed to make replacement parts, it's expensive and you have to go to an authorized dealer if something breaks. Windows is like a Ford or Chevy, it's widely used, parts are readily available and just about anyone can manufacture them, anyone can work on them. Linux is like an old car, that you have to go the junk yard to get parts for, where Harry at the auto-salvage says, yeah I got a fuel-pump that might fit that, and then retro-fits it to your model.

Well there might some truth to that analogy after all.

Until 1991 or so I was only used to using MS DOS, and MS Windows 3 (3.1 came out in 1992). But in 1991 I took up studies in an academic research group involving using/modifying/testing TCP/IP protocols over Vsat (very small aperture satellite dish) links and discovered that in the group everything from MS was considered like a 'toy' operating system, for document production everyone used Macs, but all the real computing research work was done on UNIX platforms (mix of HP and Sun - mainly Solaris OS). Linux had only just been created (and one guy in the group came in with dozens of floppy discs that were for installing early Linux... but it was very limited in comparison to Solaris and so on at that time (though certainly included X and looked similar really to what we see today - had Motif desktop). My first six weeks in that research group was leaning C (from UNIX system perspective since needed to write TCP/IP system level performance/tuning test utilities), which was from K&R programming book - actually it was pretty easy to learn, though took that time to cement it in and understand pointers and UNIX system calls in detail.

On the whole Linux and UNIX are pretty much the same to use except that Linux did not use any of the original UNIX code (various UNIX variants were around) but in a way reverse engineered its same functioning. Hence book about UNIX talks a language we are all used to in the form of Linux... IBM AIX (another UNIX sort of flavour) was also big back at that time and my first job after leaving that research group had Windows 95 machines in Novel network, plus IBM AIX server that students learned (mainly) Cobol on... And I got a couple of friends of mine from the research group who were UNIX experts to come down and help me install Linux on a server on that same system back in 1991.

The public Internet access in UK only opened in 1992 (and hardly anyone on it till 1993) and in that same job remember we used original Mosaic browser (had had ARPANET/NSFNET-I-think-viaUK_JANET access earlier in the research group so was used to smtp email and gopher and so on), and also bulletin boards were becoming popular (dial-up for most places of course - though not at the earlier research group where we had more sophisticated links).

Amazing how Linux (the baby) started to compete with the 'big boys of UNIX" such as HP, Sun and IBM to the stage when it now dominates that side of Internet server provision. Your analogy between Apple, MS, and Linux is pretty good overall. Linux is wonderful of course, but the plethora of different Linux distros and alternative continually changing kernels, drivers, and core lib upgrades (such as glibc) makes it a bit of a nightmare to maintain...