From: anonymous-remailer@shell.portal.com
Date: Sun, 29 Jan 95 21:23:25 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: alt.religion.your.operating.system.sucks
Message-ID: <199501300522.VAA17151@jobe.shell.portal.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Spif wrote:
>UNIX?  user hostile?  where have you been lately?  

Well, maybe unix gets its reputation for being hostile because of
things like 

* many commands don't work fully (find, for example)
* a large portion choke on input that isn't "expected"
* many more do extremely poor input checking,
* the configuration files are bizarre
* different version have command with different options (stty
  everything, ps -ef vs. ps -aux, etc.)
* each version is slightly different (ever try porting a non-trivial
  program?  Look at some available large software and examine the #ifdef
  #define #endif statements; look at the differences in system calls.
  Hell, look at the "config" program that comes with PERL - 80K of stuff
  to build a make file for the flavor of UNIX you are using!)
* the commands don't combine well (often uuencode + sendmail ==
  garbage)
* many commands accept a slightly different regular expression syntax
  than the shell does
* the commands aren't built with ease of use in mind.  For example, to
  kill a process under unix requires that I know it's process id.  How
  do I find that?  Run another command...

> ever hear of X windows?

X-Windows is an extreme pain to get working.  Sure, if you buy your
unix workstation the manufacturer will pre-install it.  Just try
setting it up from scratch.