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The End of Unix?

Posted by Cliff on from the what-do-you-think? dept.

XiRho asks: "Unix has lived well beyond the era in which it was born (the era of the minicomputer) and has survived and thrived in the era of the personal computer, but now, many people believe that soon we will see the transition from that era into the age of the distributed/network system. In that case, has the Slashdot community at large ever considered what the future is? Will Unix finally die off, will it adapt as it did before, or will Unix find a way to remain the same trustworthy system it always has been? And if Unix will come to an end, what does the Slashdot community feel will be its succesor? " (Read More)

Unix may never become big on the desktop, but that battle is still being fought and it probably won't be over for a few years. However we shouldn't forget where the large strength of Unix lies: the network. Unix -runs- the Internet. I don't think any other Operating System can say that. The Internet started on Unix, the Internet was built on Unix and unless something better comes along (and that implies that we don't have "better" yet) the Internet will die running Unix.

Of course Unix, like any other modern OS, must change over time to accommodate new technologies and methodologies, but I see Unix being more able to adapt in todays fast changing Information Technology world than other operating systems based on monolithic kernels.

What do you think? Am I missing something? Is there a Unix killer in the works that I might have missed?

8 of 451 comments (clear)

  1. More meaningless tripe by Jeffrey+Baker · · Score: 5
    Unix is an operating system. Its purpose is to operate the hardware inside your computer, and to provide a programmatic and generalized interface to that hardwares' capabilities. As long as Unix continues to operate popular hardware and provide an interface that programmers like, Unix cannot die.

    The advent of distributed, collaborative, pure-hype^H^H^H^Hjava, Active System Blaster 2000 will not make Unix obsolete. Even a revolutionary, fully distributed and autonomous network object system still needs to send bytes over the wire, still needs to access system memory, and still needs to accept input and create output. These are the things that Unix provides. This is why Unix will always be around.

    I suppose that a newer operating system could supplant Unix. However, I don't seen any in the near future. Be has a bright future, because it has networking and other nice capabilities. But Unix has the trump card over BeOS: the idea of users. In a distributed network environment, the user concept becomes much more important. Information, files, interface configuration, and many other things are associated with a person. Those things must be secured from other people, and the other people must be secured from them. Therefore any OS that wishes to supplant Unix will need to supply the same kind of protection for users' information.

    Cheers,
    jwb

    1. Re:More meaningless tripe by Mucky+Pup · · Score: 5

      I agree. The obituaries for all other OSes will more than likely be typed up on a Unix box in ed.

  2. monolithic random comments by Squiggle · · Score: 5
    Of course Unix, like any other modern OS, must change over time to accommodate new technologies and methodologies, but I see Unix being more able to adapt in todays fast changing Information Technology world than other operating systems based on monolithic kernels.

    That's funny, I thought that Unix was based on a monolithic kernel... silly semantics

    I would love to see some of the best coders and operating systems people put together a new OS from scratch using the latest techniques. Ideally this would create an ultra stable and very modular system. I would happily give up some extra CPU cycles for increased modularity and the ability to easily swap in and out OS components so that I could customize my OS to the task at hand. I find it rather ridiculous that I run the same OS when I am playing games, running a web server or working with Photoshop (etc). Rather than having a generically-good OS I would prefer a highly optimized OS for the task(s) at hand.

    How often do I run run a game, Photoshop, compiler, and web server concurrently on my home box? Give me adaptibility and modularity or give me death!

    --
    Complexity Happens
    1. Re:monolithic random comments by Ryan+Taylor · · Score: 5
      That's funny, I thought that Unix was based on a monolithic kernel... silly semantics

      It is, and the orrigional comment didn't suggest otherwise. Read again:
      I see Unix being more able to adapt in todays fast changing Information Technology world than other operating systems based on monolithic kernels.

      "other operating systems based on" implies that unix is one of a group of "operating systems based on ..." and that there are others.


      But that's not what I really wanted to comment on.

      I would love to see some of the best coders and operating systems people put together a new OS from scratch using the latest techniques.

      Hrm... read: http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd.html
      Ideally this would create an ultra stable
      Read: http://www.eros-os.org/
      working with Photoshop (etc).
      Read: http://www.be.com/

      Alternatives are out there. You just haven't found them.


      -rt
      ======
      Now, I think it would be GOOD to buy FIVE or SIX STUDEBAKERS
      and CRUISE for ARTIFICIAL FLAVORING!!

      --

  3. The End of Troll Questions? by jabber · · Score: 5

    Unix is not a product, it is a set of evolving ideas. As such, it is not going anywhere but up.

    It's just as easy to ask: Is this the end of silverware, or the end of fire, or the end of any old thing that's proven to work... Is genetic engineering the end of agriculture? Is organ transplantation the end of death? Is The Bomb the end of War?

    Yeah, there's micro-kernel based OSes out there like Qnx and NeXT, and Hurd... But they're still Unix. The NEW OS X from Apple is more Unix than it's predecessor. NT is more Unix than Win95.. There's new approaches like BeOS.

    If one defines Unix in a very constrained way then Unix has been dead for a long time. When AT&T first released System V, and allowed it to mutate, Unix died and was reborn in a variety of ways. Umm, that was what? 1976?

    If one defines Unix broadly, as a set of concepts, a layered architecture, levels of abstraction, sets of small uni-purpose tools working together, APIs and things 'grep-like' then guess what? Unix will live forever.

    It's a pointless question, not because it's bad, but because it's completely subjective.

    --

    -- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
  4. I think it's meaningless... by seebs · · Score: 5

    Unix is too broad a family of systems to "die". It's not like AmigaDOS, or VMS, where there's just one Unix and it can "fall behind". Unix will be replaced, but it'll be replaced by more Unix.

    --
    My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
  5. I have SEEN the future by weave · · Score: 5

    I have seen the future. The future is filled with operating systems that demand that their system binary directories be writable to all, else they fail.

    I have seen the future. It has an operating system whose applications, even those written by the OS authors, can ignore the TEMP environment variable and scribble temporary files where-ever they want and fail to operate if they can not do as they wish.

    I have seen the future. The future is filled with continued support for legacy drive letters and 8.3 file names with rename.ini kludges during installs.

    I have seen the future. The future is an operating system where you have to shell out serious dollars to buy third-party utilities to get around security deficiences in the design of the OS. After all, why fix that pesky virus problem when so many anti-virus companies would go under without that revenue stream coming in.

    I have seen the future. It has operating systems whose file systems don't support the concept of being able to delete a file yet have it not actually get deleted until the last remaining process that has it open dies first. For doing so would prevent the need to put dynamic link libraries into a temporary space and have them "installed" during a reboot. Reboots are good. They clear up sloppy OS design problems.

    I have seen the future. The future is filled with grand marketing schemes like "Administration Kits" that promise all kinds of abilities to deploy corporate policy restrictions to users yet neglect to mention that these policies are applied by a program that has to write to an area of the OS that was previously recommended be R/O due to the security problems it causes if it is R/W, hence making the ability to make the scheme work as advertised impossible for all users who do not have full permissions to their workstation.

    The future, my friends, is about image and not function. UNIX is ugly. It's doomed.

    Or in other words, resistance is futile. At least that is what they want us to believe... :)

  6. It's not going anywhere.. by Fas+Attarac · · Score: 5

    There's no reason to "convert" most of our existing Internet/networking infrastructure to anything else in the forseeable future. I agree with the prediction that things will end up moving more towards centralized computer resources, and lesser-equipped but ubiquitous terminals to access those resources, but Unix will still be there in some fashion.

    Who's to say Unix won't be the OS that drives the appliances?