“unix philosophy” is philosophy for which unix is entirely unsuited for as it’s ability to compose functions(programs are just functions but retarded) is utter garbage due to it relying on text. Want to process any structure more complex than a list? Forget it. Want to have guarantees that list of numbers that you have sent to another program will be treated in appropriate manner to their type? impossible! Want to have non linear dara flow? Gl fucking with pipes. In order for such philosophy to be applicable there needs to be standardized protocol for passing and describing data ie type system(preferably at least as power-full as haskells) and come kind of function composition be it pipes, channels, map, reduce etc. It is not coincidental that no serious program follows it, choosing instead to rely on language dependent libraries.
See, it was a good philosophy for a good OS. For it's time, which was the 70's. In the next two decades computing evolved so much that it could no longer hold up, but for some reason the entirety of the FOSS movement kept adhering to it in the wake of all the advanced modern computing structures, while at the same time bloating the Linux kernel so much that even Torvalds admitted it's bloated, and wishing to compete with Windows NT while at the same time wanting to be nothing like Windows NT.
This FOSS revolution is bound to fail if all of the FOSS community won't get a reality check they should've gotten when that one Finnish student wrote a Unix clone for shits and giggles. But given how things were going that's never going to happen and Linux will never overtake Windows, not in a million years. The Linux community has such strong idiosyncratic beliefs that it's holding up for the same reason Windows is still holding up: sheer luck and coincidence. In a sane world both would've already collapsed from how trash both are.
I long for the day when the paradigm shifts from running Linux in a VM whenever you need it to doing the same with Windows. Ad clogged corpo niggerware can't go extinct fast enough.
See above. Never going to happen unless all of Linux community finally finds a center. Right now they're as stable as a thoroughly stretched out ball of rubber bands. This ad clogged corpo niggerware will forever dominate over FOSS no matter how bad it will get because FOSS refuses to make up their mind. Do they want to be a hobbyist OS that dates back to 70's OS design? Or do they want to be a modern desktop OS that can compete with Windows NT and macOS? Either one or another, by constantly trying to eat your cake and have it too you're dooming FOSS OS alternatives to fail.
Microsoft attained the character it has, as a predator and not a solution provider, because of their corporate ethos.
He still told the truth. They key to success is developers. Linux overly relies on ideology and puts it over writing good software. Windows NT still dominates the market because at it's code, Windows NT was good code written by good developers. You can bitch and moan about how the surface level Pajeetification has totally ruined those foundations left by Dave Cutler and the like, but you and I both know that it's not true and there's a reason people still use Windows despite how badly Nadella redeemed it, and no one is making a massive switch to Linux despite the redeeming.
You can also bitch and moan about how Microsoft has purposefully undercut FOSS and everyone else by forming an aggressive OS monopoly, but it's useless since Windows NT's software ecosystem is still the dominant one and no one is going to do a sudden switch to the chaotic hellscape that is desktop Linux that keeps changing it's mind about core elements of it's OS every other week. One day it's a separate package, the other it's a systemd module. One day it's X11, the other it's Wayland. Meanwhile on Windows it's all the same API calls as they were back in the 90's. Which platform will people
and developers choose? In the dream world it'll be the FOSS hellscape. In the real world it'll be the MS monopoly.
But of course, when it comes to this corporate undercutting of FOSS which I by no mean deny, suddenly it's biggest strength that could counterbalance it, which is the community, ceases to exists, and all that's left is this bitching to uphold this dream that deep down you know is dead because the FOSS community is powerless against the corporate influence. Poettering hasn't been toppled over by better FOSS solutions despite how much people bitch and moan about systemd. Red Hat's fuckery hasn't been toppled over by better FOSS solutions despite how much people bitch and moan about all of their retarded decisions. Or perhaps the FOSS community could accomplish all of that, and could've already accomplished it, if for once they stopped arguing about ideology, listened to Ballmer and started writing code.
The key to success is developers. People hated him because he told them the truth.
When the Linux community was arguing about ideology, Microsoft was hiring programmers. That's how they ultimately won. It always comes down to how good the code is, not who did what dirty tricks to attain the market monopoly. Autodesk basically went extinct in the good chunk of the 3D industry due to Blender becoming so good. Autodesk could bribe the industry into still relying on 3DS Max or Maya if it was about influence, but Blender still won. Because it had better code. Linux is not a competitor to Windows NT and Microsoft knows that. Not because Microsoft asserted their dominance since the 90's, but because Microsoft still has the better code.
Not that I expect anyone in this thread to take up a legitimate critical discussion on all the shortcomings of Linux, it's community and the FOSS movement as a whole. If that were possible then this FOSS revolution would've already happened. Instead, any criticism of the highest holiness that is Linux, Stallman and FOSS is heresy. Even though Stallman would give me a proper fair shake with all of my criticisms, unlike the community that apparently upholds his ideas so much.
tl;dr: ideology doesn't write good code, and good code is what takes over industries, not money and influence. Money can buy good programmers, there is no incentive for good programmers to contribute to FOSS. That's why desktop Linux will forever remain below 10% market share and that's why Microsoft will forever dominate the desktop market no matter how bad Nadella shits over WinNT.
