[gentoo-dev] The Beauty of Unix

[Paul Varner]

On 2/9/16 7:44 AM, Rich Freeman wrote:
> I thought the whole beauty of unix was the everything-is-a-file design?
No, the beauty of Unix has always been the architectural philosophy of 
loose-coupling of the components of the system.
The "everything is a file" is a result of that philosophy.  The end 
result of this is that you can switch out components of the system 
without redesigning other aspects of the system.  That is the philosophy 
that allows Gentoo to exist as meta-distribution and to provide choice 
for what you want.

On the other side you have Windows which tightly-couples everything in 
the system.  This does have the advantage of making everything have the 
same look and feel and "just work".  And I fully understand why 
Microsoft went that route, it made things easy for people who don't care 
and is what made them the huge company that they are today.

Sidebar, the reason you have to reboot a Windows box so much during 
updates is because of the tight-coupling.  With Unix, you typically only 
need to reboot if you update the kernel.

However, tight-coupling has big issues for people who do care or don't 
like the design that is being given to them.  I switched from Windows to 
Linux and OS X solely because I got very tired of fighting the design 
forced on to me and the fact that a bug in one piece of software would 
often kill the entire system.

And that is the reason that I don't care for systemd.  They are 
tightly-coupling everything together under their design approach. It is 
intended to be a one size fits all. While it will have the benefit of 
"just working", and does fit in with where Red Hat, etc, want to go with 
Linux. It will have the same disadvantages that Windows has.

Regards,
Paul