Re: [TUHS] Macs and future unix derivatives

On Mon, Feb 08, 2021 at 10:32:03AM -0800, Justin Coffey wrote: The problem is users all want a different set of features. One person's "small and clean" is another person's "missing critical feature". This is one of the problems which the Linux enterprise distro's see. Everyone wants everything to stay the same --- except for their own pet feature. Or because they want their new hardware (say, NVMe, which wasn't present in the version of the Linux kernel that was frozen for the enterprise distro three years ago). Ultimately, the reason why you can't have what you want boils down to sheer economics. If you want to pay a small team to give you exactly what you want, but nothing else, then sure, you can have what you want. If you and two dozen want _exactly_ the same thing, then it will be a lot cheaper. But if you want something which is free as in beer, or even the cost of iOS, then it needs to have all of the features and hardware support for a much larger set of customers. It's interesting that some folks are complaining about "elistism"; but they don't seem to recognize that asking for something super small and clean, that is inherently elitist. I also suspect they don't *actually* want something _that_ small, in terms of feature set. Do they *really* want something which is just V7 Unix, with nothing else? No TCP/IP, no hot-plug USB support? No web browsing? If so, it shouldn't be that hard to squeeze a PDP-11 into a laptop form factor, and they can just run V7 Unix. Easy-peasy! Oh, you wanted more than that? Feature bloat! Feature bloat! Feature bloat! Shame! Shame! Shame! - Ted