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liam_on_linux) wrote2025-05-03 11:42 am
On becoming living history
It is one of the oddest things in computing that stuff to me, as a big kid of heading for 60 years old but who still feels quite young and enjoys learning and exploring, that the early history of Linux – a development that came along mid-career for me – and indeed Unix, which was taking shape when I was a child, is mysterious lost ancient history now to those working in the field.
It’s not that long ago. It’s well within living memory for lots of us who are still working with it in full time employment. Want to know why this command has that weird switch? Then go look up who wrote it and ask him. (And sadly yes there’s a good chance it’s a “him”.)
Want to know why Windows command switches are one symbol and Unix ones another? Go look at the OSes the guys who wrote them ran before. They are a 2min Google away and emulators are FOSS. Just try them and you can see what they learned from.
This stuff isn’t hieroglyphics. It’s not carved on the walls of tombs deep underground.
The reason that we have Snap and Flatpak and AppImage and macOS .app is all stuff that happened since I started my first job. I was there. So were thousands of others. I watched it take shape.
But now, I write about how and why and I get shouted at by people who weren’t even born yet. It’s very odd.
To me it looks like a lot of people spend thousands of developer-hours flailing away trying to rewrite stuff that I deployed in production in my 30s and they have no idea how it’s supposed to work or what they’re trying to do. They’re failing to copy a bad copy of a poor imitation.
Want to know how KDE 6 should have been? Run Windows 95 in VirtualBox and see how the original worked! But no, instead, the team flops and flails adding 86 more wheels to a bicycle and then they wonder why people choose a poor-quality knock-off of a 2007 iPhone designed by people who don’t know why the iPhone works like that.
I am, for clarity, talking about GNOME >3. And the iPhone runs a cut down version of Mac OS X Tiger’s “Dashboard” as its main UI.