Systemd is nothing new, Linux copying comercial UNIXes and Windows/VMS, with the community dumping hate left and right on the authors.

cgroups has been a thing on mainframes for decades.

Everything "has been done before" in computing. The difference is a matter of degree and attention to detail.

And your comment about it having been a thing on mainframes underscores my point.

The server story for Linux is evolving (and maturing) greatly, and very quickly. The Linux of today is not at all like the Linux from 2010. To say that Linux is stuck in some sort of legacy UNIX quagmire is just silly.

So what ideas are actually new, introduced by Linux crowd, instead of copied from either older UNIXes or mainframes?

How about recvmmsg? I never saw that before Linux, and haven't been able to find a reference to anything similar on say AIX or Solaris.

Really?

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/re...

Yes really. I wrote recvmmsg. You linked to recvmsg. They are not the same thing.

I never have seen a Bitrot resistant filesystem on Linux before NILFS.

Did you read my comment? There are no "new" ideas in computing. Everything has already been invented in the 1960's. It's the finesse of execution that matters, not ideas.

I did and you are wrong, there are plenty of ideas to bring to the market, when one doesn't constrain themselves to copy mainframes and big iron UNIXes, and catching up with whatever Apple, Google and Microsoft do on UI/UX.

>It's the finesse of execution that matters, not ideas.

That's a crime to say "finesse" and "systemd" in the same discussion.

SystemD is like Solaris service manager, but far worse.

And, on cgroups, I think AIX has something like that but much, much, MUCH better.

It’s even worse. Systemd, dbus and journald are basically service manager, DCOM and Event Log from windows, but worse!

It’s not the wrong type of solution but systemd is somewhat stinky compared to what we could have had.

D-BUS ideas actually trace back to ToolTalk on Solaris.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ToolTalk

What made Solaris sm better? Curious as I never used that one.

It is called LPAR.

It's called WPAR. LPARs are hypervisor level partitioning.

You're right, I stand corrected.

Systemd does a lot more than just manage services. The underlying architecture is a generic resource and dependency management system.

>generic resource and dependency management system

Generic is the complete wrong word for systemd, it's the opposite of Generic.

Long time ago in a other galaxy there was a system called "time sharing system"

>The two are huge and novel developments in OS design

Yeah "new" since the 1960 on a Computer called PDP10 from DEC

The older I get, the more our devotion to the CLI feels like gatekeeping.

> The older I get, the more our devotion to the CLI feels like gatekeeping.

Nah... you can't take one of the handful of major styles of interaction with computing devices and diminish adherence to that style as just 'gatekeeping'. There are moments where the strengths of GUI interaction is useful (discovery of options, selection of individual objects, etc.), but modern systems are complex and large enough that you can't really walk away from the idea of expressing operations and state linguistically without walking away from tools you need to do your job efficiently (or at all). So yeah, maybe CLI is less accessible and more difficult for newcomers, but the problems they solve aren't necessarily easy, either.

However... I do think there are many opportunities for both better accessibility in CLI's and better interoperability between CLI's and GUI's. Better discovery of options in CLI would help (autocomplete, etc.), as would a better connection between the GUI and CLI worlds. (Lisp has some good ideas where the "terminal" remembers the object it prints and allows interaction with those objects, as opposed to just remembering a string character representation of them. Microsoft's Office applications similarly will write macro code for you as you interact with the UI - which is a great way to understand the relationship between the two worlds.)

I don't see it that way. My first computer used Win95 and I didn't get into CLI until college and then seriously at work. I'm not a Unix expert, but am blown away by how much more powerful it is than Windows in many uses. I even push files to a Linux server for analysis at times as I can tear through a file with grep/cut/awk/sort/uniq and some pipes very quickly and efficiently. There are many other technologies I know, yet the simple terminal is still the best approach for many of my uses. The design has stood the test of time for a reason and the compositional approach is nice. Nobody is gatekeeping here.

Gatekeeping from what? Linux is a server OS.

Finally given up on "Year of Desktop Linux"?

I've been running desktop Linux for 20 years, but this isn't a hill I'm gonna die on. Kernel and userland developers treat Linux as a server OS first and foremost, and that's where the funding goes.

The year of Desktop Linux arrived for me about a decade ago. Now I work, game, watch movies, edit graphics and photos, all on Linux.

I like and want the powerful combination of the CLI and GUI applications.

The point of "Linux on the desktop" was not that it happens for you and the other commenter, but that Linux becomes mainstream. :) Never happened and unless something extraordinary occurs it likely never will. And Android doesn't count, obviously.

True. But it also has the connotation that Linux is "not good enough" for the desktop, and this is false. Popularity has a lot of factors, sadly. A user-friendly Linux like Ubuntu is indeed "good enough" and has been so for years.

Finally met one of the happy 1% from Steam surveys.

Also GOG and Humble Bundle ;)

It's generally a joy to use Linux. In some cases (like HP LaserJet printers) even more painless than Windows and macOS!

Hi, here's another one :-)

Happy Linux user since 2004/5.

Everything else is painful in some way or another.