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What's Wrong with Unix?

Posted by Cliff on from the defects-and-potential-solutions dept.

aaron240 asks: "When Google published the GLAT (Google Labs Aptitude Test) the Unix question was intriguing. They asked an open-ended question about what is wrong with Unix and how you might fix it. Rob Pike touched on the question in his Slashdot interview from October. What insightful answers did the rest of Slashdot give when they applied to work at Google? To repeat the actual question, 'What's broken with Unix? How would you fix it?'"

12 of 1,318 comments (clear)

  1. Several frustrating points by SIGALRM · · Score: 5, Insightful
    What's wrong with UNIX? Depends on which perspective you start...

    In my opinion, here are some headaches that have plagued a wary UNIX engineer or two:

    IEEE and Posix, X/Open, etc. provide a basis for standardizing UNIX interfaces, but adherence tends to be spotty

    Difficult to implement a microkernel architecture

    XPG3 aside, a de facto "common API" has never really been acheived

    In many cases, code scrutiny is difficult or impossible

    Progress and innovation tends to occur within the context of aquisitions (i.e. UnixWare)

    The COFF symbolic system is terrible (OK, I know it's a deprecated, but still...)

    PIT initialization (time management)

    Kernel tuning (anyone fiddled with the /etc/conf/cf.d subdir on OS5?) These are just a few things, in my experience. That said, UNIX has had some great days.

    --
    Sigs cause cancer.
    1. Re:Several frustrating points by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
      In addition:

      1. Crappy filesystem. Resier4 or XFS is what UNIX should have started with and even now we don't have file versioning.
      2. POSIX permisions suck. The suid bit sucks even more. ACL's make more sense, and UNIX should have had them from the start. If we're doing it now, capabilities would be even better.
      3. IPC primitives are poor. SySV shared memory goes some way to helping, and UNIX domain sockets are O.K, but a proper message/event marsheling system would eclipse them all.
      4. The filesystem hierachy is an awful mess. Non-standard across all unices and poorly evolved to cope with modern systems. /etc was a horrible copout and it shows. UNIX needs proper application packaging with proper self-contained application packages.
      5. Providing lots of little applications to do specific tasks was the best idea ever, but not providing a decent scripting language to bind them together was a bone-headed mistake. Likewise not standardising some basic data-interchange formats (Even it was just pre-formated ASCII) just makes piping all those little tools together to do anything useful a pain.
    2. Re:Several frustrating points by jargoone · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Add another thing that's wrong with Unix: the elitist attitude towards outsiders.

    3. Re:Several frustrating points by insert_username_here · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Mod parent up!!

      I've been happily using Linux on my home PC for about 4 years, but the filesystem layout has always been an annoyance.

      Without a package manager, it's practically impossible to remove a program; even with a package manager, you can't even determine how big a given package is! (if you know how to with Portage, I'd like to know). A better filesystem layout (perhaps the way MacOSX, GoboLinux or RoX does it) would make package managers obsolete.

      A lack of standard configuration layout is another thing: why should people have to learn hundreds of config file formats? Yes, comments help, but it'd be nice if they weren't needed. Why not come up with one standard text-based config format/filesystem layout and get everyone to use it? This would also save programming time, as you could create a library (with a name like libconfig or something similar) and not have to worry about parsing configuration settings. The Windows Registry Hell can be avoided by using a text-based format(e.g. like Java properties files or XML).

      A standard configuration layout (with suitable metadata) would also go a long way to allowing a standard graphical system configuration utility (Whatever happened to linuxconf? I loved that app!), making Unix/Linux that much more accessible to ordinary people.

      Replies, flames, etc.

      --
      -- Dramatisation - May Not Have Happened
    4. Re:Several frustrating points by linguae · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I strongly agree. Snide comments such as "BSD isn't for you," especially if the person trying to install it seems interested in learning about it, isn't going to help the Unix installed base grow. Such trolls hurt the *nix community in general because they are turning away prospective users.

      If anything, us Unix users should be trying to convert as many people as we can to our OS, not turning them off and turning them away.

    5. Re:Several frustrating points by antoy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Given the skill and experience that it takes, in my experience, to be able to run Unix as naturally as some people do... perhaps they've earned that attitude.

      That's complete nonsense. Installing and running Unix hardly counts as one of the more difficult intellectual tasks. It's hard, sure, if you're used to something different, but the description 'windows people' includes novelists, artists and nuclear scientists who just don't give a damn about the stupid OS their computer runs.

      Would you like it if an artist made fun of your pens and call you and your friends BIC people? Well, that's how stupid this sounds.

  2. OS X by BWJones · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Based upon my experience with IRIX and Solaris (with some Linux), I would have to say that most of the things that *NIX did poorly have been rectified with OS X. I would have said OS X was still lacking true 64bitness, but that is coming in 10.4 rather quickly now. The numbers of Macs involved in secure and classified work in the Federal government have been exploding and high bandwidth networking options for cluster computing have also been resolved with options such as Infiniband. Development issues have been streamlined with rather nice tools from Apple itself obtained via NeXT. Open standards are being embraced just about everywhere you turn in OS X, a true plug and play environment now exists (I am reminded of the last video card install on my SGI O2 which had me down for two days solid), the GUI is consistent and the CLI is present and fully integrated with the GUI as well. Additionally, more and more networking options are being supported natively within OS X which is one of the last hurdles to true interconnectivity cross platform. And the G5! Oh, the G5 is a wonderful bit of hardware with which to run *NIX on.

    Problems that remain are being able to create one seamless environment with shared memory and such, but the rest of the *NIX world is still having those problems as well.

    You can argue about the specifics and details of many things, but in terms of a UNIX workstation, OS X pretty much has it all for our needs.

    --
    Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
    1. Re:OS X by edesjard · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This is actually a really good point. My biggest complaint about Linux has always been that it constantly tries to copy WINDOWS which I have been totally disgusted by and why I love my Mac. I keep hearing that everyone wants OS X on x86 hardware. Why hasn't Linux, which appears to be floundering aimlessly, focused its efforts on being more like OS X than Windows? Isn't it what will REALLY motivate people to give Linux a try?

  3. cynical view by Keitopsis · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Problem:
    Unix is great!, unless:
    - You just want a plug and pray answer
    - You just want a word processor
    - You just want ......

    If someone is only looking for a single application, it is hard to shove such a versitile system down their throat.

    Solution:
    Create a truely modular UNIX/OS that does not depend on any single environment(init/SYSV). Make a pluggable API-level interface that you can plug anything from a single application to a complete system environment into. Then get someone to develop EXACTLY what you want.

    Idiotware without the bloat.

    Laughing all the way,

    -- Kei

  4. Easy! by Telastyn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Lack of coherent newbie documentation.

    Sure, man pages exist, but even once you learn that man does what help really should the man pages are generally written by programmers for programmers.

    Newbie guides generally don't get any further than a small command summary, which doesn't really show any strengths of unix over using a gui [or windows!]

    The best thing I think would be to provide more "whole system" examples/help rather than help for each individual command. Take some nice simple topics [how to add many users, how to determine network utilization programatically, how to determine open ports and what process is using them...] which are painful to do on windows and use a variety of unix tools to solve them.

  5. The C language by lazy_arabica · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yeah, I know that most *nix lover simply love it. But let's face it : this language, which is still the most important one in a unix environment, is really aging. It is possible to develop big software in pure C, but it takes much, much time, and the risk of introducing bugs and security flows is huge. Only the minimal low-level core of the system should be based on C ; the rest should be developed in a modern, high-level language.

  6. My list. by Yaztromo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Here are the general problems I have with Unix and Unix-like operating systems:

    • Threading models and scheduling. A few Unicies have decent thread models, but others have abysmal thread models and scheduling. Because of this, far too many Unix applications wind up eschewing threads for simply running multiple processes, which isn't the same thing. Thread priority needs to be global, and the thread should be the most primitive execution unitt upon which all other execution units are built. No more "my thread priority is set to the max, but I get very few slices because my process priority is set low". My OS/2 machine running on a P3-450 can still out-thread many multi-gigahertz Unix systems, and that's just sad. Too many Unix kernels have had threads bolted on as an after-thought, and it shows.

      (Note that this isn't to say that every Unix-style system has a bad threading model -- some of them are pretty good, and others are getting better. But it's currently difficult to write decent cross-platform multithreaded Unix code when some Unicies you know in advance have really crappy threading subsystems).

    • Clipboard support in GUI subsystems. Come on, it's 2004 already. Unified clipboards have been around for more than 20 years now, and yet many Unicies still can't get this right. Cutting and pasting between applications shouldn't be a major PITA. Users shouldn't have to worry about which widget library an application was compiled against to figure out if they'll be able to paste to that application from another. Things are getting better, but really, this should have been fixed years ago, and shouldn't be taking so long.
    • GUI application font support. Again, a rare few get this right, but most of them have this big conglomeration of font types, and no unified font access system. Windows 3.0 had a beter font subsystem than what some Unicies have.
    • Printing. Again, some Unicies have done a good job, but far too many still don't have a good unified printing subsystem. Others here have done a great job of pointing out the problems with Unix printing in general, so I won't rehash them all here.
    • Desktop access APIs. Even with KDE and Gnome, there still isn't an API to call to do something as simple as create an application icon on the desktop or in the application menus which can be used to launch an application. Everyone winds up having to roll-their-own, if they bother to do so at all. Again, not all Unix GUI environments suffer from this, but the majority do. As I developer, I shouldn't have to care what environment a user is running if I want to do something like put an icon on their desktop as a part of an installation/configuration routine -- there should be an API I can call that says "create an icon with the following properties", and have it worry about WM/environment specifics.
    • USB driver development and device access. Again, in many Unicies this is fundementally flawed and can be very difficult for users to set-up and configure. And it differs drastically from Unix to Unix. Where we have pretty standard systems for accessing RS-232 serial ports, and parallel ports, USB access is completely non-standardized across Unicies. Just witness the PITA it is to set-up the newly standardized javax.usp API on Linux, and the kernel work-arounds that had to be implemented to allow APIs like this to unload aggressive modules that grab interface focus immediately just because they were included with the distro. There isn't much excuse for this IMO.
    • Unicode support. Again, hit or miss.

    Okay -- now don't get me wrong -- there are a lot of things to like about Unix and Unix-like environments. But those are the items I personally have problems with in the general case (and again, not all Unicies exhibit all of these issues. In particular, Mac OS X doesn't suffer from any of them, and is my current OS of choice for doing development and as my personal workstation desktop environment).

    Yaz.