Posts by stuartko

The Land Before Linux: Let's talk about the Unix desktops

Re: It wasn't really the desktop

I used plenty of generic SCSI drives on Sun SPARCs. There wasn't any need to buy a special Sun HD.

The story is different if you actually worked in the enterprise with Sun servers, because there you would likely have purchased a support contract and it's not a great idea to toss random HDs in your $100K Unix server. You buy spares from Sun because they come with a warranty, are guaranteed to work, and will be replaced by a Sun field engineer within 4 hours if there's a problem.

Unix workstations weren't fiddly to work on. They were more expensive in many cases, but the quality of the hardware was much better than PCs. and better hardware costs more money, so that accounts for much of the difference.

I used to hear Windows PC fanbois whine about how Macs were more expensive too. However, they always compared some off-brand white-box PC crap to a Mac. Hardly an Apples to Apples comparison.

Re-installing Solaris was no big deal. Once you had a Jumpstart server, it was pretty easy to install on whatever systems you wanted to. As for being easier to work with, Solaris was easier to work with at the time. Linux became easier to work with, and to some extent commodity PC hardware got better, but Solaris x86 benefited from a lot of that better hardware too, so it's not just Linux.

Solaris x86 never really did well because for a long time Sun didn't want it to succeed. They were selling RISC hardware and didn't want x86 to compete with that. By the time they did start trying to sell Solaris x86 it was too late. The whole company was on a downward spiral. Then they were purchased by Oracle and it was all over. People started moving to AIX or to Linux like rats fleeing a sinking ship. Or like people fleeing a stinking Larry.

Windows didn't have license management built in for 3rd-party apps that I remember. It did have some sort of license code needed for Windows itself, but MS didn't really care to enforce that until they had the market sewn up and had everyone over a barrel.

FlexLM was one of the license managers I remember, and there was also a bunch of software that required hardware dongles. Solaris, HP UX, and Windows had these. I think Linux had versions too, but hardly anyone at the time would buy the software that needed these because real UNIX on RISC hardware was so much more capable that nobody was buying most of this software for use on Linux.

In the end you should use what hardware and software you prefer, and I have no problem with that. I just don't think that your analysis of things from the past is correct.

Re: MacOS May Be A Unix™ Licensee ...

I have used too many UNIX and unix-like OSes over the past 35-or-so years to remember all of them. I definitely do consider macOS to be part of the Unix family, and I felt the same about NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP.

There have been plenty of differences between all of these, but the overall flavor and feel was much the same. I don't expect them to be exactly the same, and I certainly expect to have to conform to some of the local environment, but they're all Unix to me. Did I find some of them to be kind of weird? Yep. They were all Unix though.:-)

Re: No, FreeBSD lost out due to the legal issues, not the GPL

Some developers just want their code to be used and shared. They put less conditions on that than do some other developers.

I think it's kind of silly to argue about licenses in this way because what license to use is just down to the preference of the developer.

It's like that lake with the long name in Massachusetts with the possibly apocryphal translation of its name being, "You fish on your side, we'll fish on our side, and nobody fish in the middle." Stick the the side (license) you want and let others stick to their side. :-)

(It's Lake Char­gogg­a­gogg­man­chaugg­a­gogg­chau­bun­a­gung­a­maugg)

Given that Apple got rid of 32-bit support a while ago. there were some inaccuracies about macOS too. :-)

I do agree with the article about the many proprietary flavors of UNIX being part of what gave Microsoft an opening to take over. I'm not as sure that the same situation exists with Linux. Linux is free software, so there isn't quite the same competition as there was with proprietary UNIX. There are basically 2 Linux ecosystems. RH-based and Debian-based. (SuSE was originally RH-based and I still consider to be in that ecosystem.)

I decided on Debian 30 years ago and have stuck with Debian-based distros. They've been a comfortable place for me all this time, and they've allowed me to do my work. I still work with Ubuntu Server on a daily basis.

I do use Linux on the desktop via a Raspberry Pi and also a PC with Linux Mint. I'm happy with this situation. I also use a Mac for work and I find that to be pretty comfortable to use.

I tend to pick software that does what I want and that I can actually use. I don't worry about software from a different ecosystem, and I don't worry about what software _you_ choose to use. That's been working for me for a very long time. :-)

For password protection, dump LastPass for open source Bitwarden

Re: +1 for Bitwarden

You may not want to keep autofill turned on. Search for an article on the Freedom To Tinker site titled: "No boundaries for user identities: Web trackers exploit browser login managers"

The article is from 2017, and I don't know if various web browsers or password manager plugins have fixed the problem or not, but I turned off autofill back in 2017 and haven't tried it since.

Get over it: Microsoft is a Linux and open source company these days

Microsoft may now be part of the Linux community, but I don't see that, at their core, they've changed that much. I know a few people who work there and they say that the work environment is less toxic than it was when Gates or Ballmer ran things, so at least something has improved.

Microsoft has always been a company with distasteful business practices and it's simply part of their DNA. I don't know if it will ever change.