strangest systems I've sent email from

On 28 April 2016 at 16:52, <alexmcwhirter at triadic.us> wrote: That's true, and I am choosing to interpret it as an encouraging sign. I have nothing against systemd -- I have looked into it and I think I more or less grasp both the pros and the antis. I have no horse in the race; whereas I used to play around with init scripts and whatnot, mostly, that was decades ago now and these days, for my own use, I favour anything which "just works". Which is why I'm tying on a (cheap, used) Mac, on which I mostly run FOSS and freeware. I tried it years ago. I found it a very unpleasant experience, and went to some communities, both online and real-world, to ask for guidance. One of my questions was "how can I choose a simpler init? I don't like SysV init, I prefer the BSD one. How do I switch?" At first they didn't understand the question at all. When I got it across, the reaction was incredulity: "why on Earth would you want to do that?!" I could tweak the compile flags and optimisation of KDE, but not change the init. That's not customisation in my book: that's yak-shaving, painting the bike shed a new colour. Basically pointless; I wanted more profound change, and Gentoo didn't offer it and the Gentoo community couldn't grasp /why/ I'd want to change something so profound that it was a given, an axiom, a fundamental. So I gave up on it before I even had a fully-working system. Last time I tried, probably one of the last versions of OpenSolaris, it couldn't understand either my chipset-integrated Ethernet port /or/ the on-motherboard 3rd party Ethernet. So I didn't get very far; it worked, but I couldn't get online. Well, perhaps. But I'm interested in something *way* more different than just a different Unix. I like to play with things like Haiku, AROS, Syllable, Morphos. Interesting, but none are complete enough for me to work in them, sadly. I'm intrigued by projects like Movitz, Interim, TempleOS -- the /really/ different stuff. But all are prototypes, demos, so dramatically limited they can't be /used/ yet. I lack the skills to make Plan 9 or Minix 3 do anything useful. And I read about now-dead historical OSes such as Taos (later Intent), which I played with all-too-briefly at an Acorn World show about 20y ago, or Parhelion's HeliOS for Transputer machines. Nothing even _remotely_ like them exists any more. Here's hoping. ISTM that what it's actually leading to is polishing the same turds. (OK, "turd" is grossly unfair, I actually hugely admire Linux, but I hope my general meaning is clear.) We are continuing to refine and tweak a 1970s-style OS -- a technologically conservative monolithic Unix. FOSS Unix hasn't even caught up with 1990s style Unix design yet, the early microkernel ones like NeXTstep or OSF/1, AKA Digital UNIX. It's roughly 2 decades behind the times. That's what Minix 3 is trying to fix, of course. And commercial Unix in general has totally failed to pick up the ideas of even Plan 9 -- which I think of as Unix Version 2.0: "even more things are files now, and the kernel is networking aware". Inferno -- Plan 9 Version 2.0, or perhaps Unix Version 3.0: "Like Plan 9, But Now We Have A Friendlier GUI And Everything's Processor-Independent", AKA "it's time, let's move on from C" -- is languishing, AFAICS. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R)