On Sat, Apr 03, 2021 at 07:23:56PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
>
> I'm the biggest SunOS 4.x fan boy and I agree.  It was ~30 years ago.
> Back then, all the open source stuff, or closed source stuff, took a
> ton of work to make it work.  It just worked on SunOS.  I can't tell
> you how many times I've brought up X10 or X11 on all sorts of systems
> (it was a good learning experience, you learned to figure out that this
> is part of my graphics card, this and that and that and that is not,
> just ifdef that out and keep going).

To be fair, a lot of that was because there's a lot of crappy
userspace software out there who assumed that all the world's a Sun
(running SunOS).  Previously it was Vax running BSD 4.x, and it's been
superceded these days with "all the world's Linux (running on x86_64)".

I'm a big Linux fan boy, but that doesn't blind me to the fact that
that there's a lot of cr*p that uses slow, maddening autoconf and
automake build systems, yet have so many Linux'isms in it that won't
build anywhere else.

The fact that a lot of software easily brings up on a particular OS
doesn't mean that it's inherently better; just that it has the
dominant mindshare.

                                                - Ted