Quadra 660AV what's with the "PowerPC" label?

[Sean Conner]

It was thus said that the Great Liam Proven once stated:
> It's a modern init. Most of panic is just headless running around. No,
> it's not an old-fashioned simplistic Unix utility. Hey, newsflash,
> neither is GNOME, neither is KDE. Neither is much of modern Unix.

  I'm not a fan of systemd, but it's not because SysV init is better, but
because of the increasing scope of systemd.  

  Okay, fine, it's a init that tracks daemons and will restart them
automatically if they stop (or crash, or whatever).  That's nice.  I don't
have a problem with that.  It can parallelize the startup daemons.  Okay ...
I never had an issue with how long a system takes to come up as I don't
really shut any of the computers off (even my desktop boxes).  But hey,
okay.  

  But no more syslog (okay, I know that's not technically true, but syslog
becomes a 2nd class citizen here).  No, Lennart decided to use a binary-only
logging system that's mostly undocumented (or rather, it's documented in
code that is subject to change from version to version) and there's no need
to forward the logs to another system---use that 2nd class syslog for that
crap if you need it.

  But that's it.  systemd only requires journald to run.  Oh, let's use dbus
for IPC because ... well ... I have no idea what, exactly, dbus brings to
the game that any of the other IPC mechanisms that currently exist in Unix
fail to have, other than being a usermode program and yet another dependency
from what I understand was mostly used as an IPC mechanism for the desktop,
but now required for servers as well.

  Linus is *still* fighting the systemd guys because they want to force dbus
into the kernel.

  Oh, and because of the say systemd works, it takes over cgroup management. 
The Linux kernel provides mechanism, not policy, but now, we have systemd
forcing a cgroup policy on everything.  Okay, perhaps systemd is the first
program to actually *use* cgroups but if at some point in the future you
want to play around with it, well ... sorry.  systemd is in control there.

  Login management is now the domain of systemd.

  Oh, and don't forget the little dustup over the "debug" kernel command
line:

	https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=mty1mza

  Over time, syslogd is taking over more and more of the system.  And that
would be fine if it were just RedHat (and RedHat derived) distributions. 
But no, Lennart is, by sheer force of will, forcing *all* Linux
distributions to use systemd.  Hell, it's now trying to force systemd
specific behavior in applications:

	https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/428

Never mind that said application can run on other Unix systems.

  Oh, and forget running GNome on any other system than Linux with systemd.

  THAT is my problem with systemd.  It's mandating a $#!?load of policy and
dependencies with largly undocumented APIs.

> If people wanted to keep to the simplicity of Unix and bring it into a
> more modern world, they had Plan 9. Plan 9 brought networking & the
> GUI into the Unix everything-is-a-file model.
> 
> But everyone ignored it, pretty much. Some wrinkles got copied later.
> 
> And Plan 9 went one better, and (mostly) eliminated that nasty old
> unsafe mess, C, and it eliminated native binaries and brought
> platform-neutral binaries to the game.

  Um ... what?  Plan 9 is written in C.  And they still use binaries, just
fat binaries (that is, the binary contains multiple code and data segments
for each supported architecture0).  This isn't just limited to Plan 9---Mac
did this as well.

> Andy Tanenbaum was right. Linux was obsolete in 1991. A new monolithic
> Unix back then? You're kidding. No. It's a rewrite of the same old
> 1960s design, with the same 3 decades' worth of crap on top.
> 
> Today, it's mainly an x86 OS for servers and an ARM OS for
> smartphones, with a few weirdos using it for workstations. So stop it
                      ^^^^^^^^^^^

  Wow!  Nice insult there.  Care to add more?

  And for the record, I still use Linux as (one) of my desktops machines.

> with the crocodile tears about "it's all text" and so on. Move on.
> It's over. It was over before I left Uni and I'm an olde pharte now.

  And you want an older Mac ... why?  System 9 is dead.  Gone on.  Pining
for the fjords!  Move on, man!  Move on!

> > Yes. IRIX is dead as a doornail. Also, with the way it died, I'd give
> > about 1000:1 odds of any legal form of IRIX ever re-surfacing. However, I
> > noticed that the source is floating around several places. Maybe some
> > illegal/hobbyist/illicit stuff might eventually see the light, but I doubt
> > it. It seems to me even the forums on Nekochan are slowing down. I still
> > use it and love it, and I have no problems securing it for "real world"
> > stuff. However, it's nothing but a hobby, nowadays.
> 
> Was it really different enough? What did it do other Unices don't?

  It was SysV with kickass graphics hardware.  Suns were BSD (at the time,
prior to Solaris) with not-so-great graphics hardware.  That's pretty much
the difference.

  -spc (Never did like Suns, but then again, I was spoiled by using SGIs)