Fortunately, we were once again saved from a monoculture by....mobile
phones.

Now it has to run on Linux on x86_64 *and* arm64.  And because Apple has
managed to nail down its brand as The Lifestyle Phone For Rich People, it
also has to build in a vaguely-BSD userland for arm (disclaimer: writing
this on an M1 Macbook Air, with an iPhone beside me on my desk--but all my
real work happens on Linux/x86_64 on Someone Else's Computer, usually
Google's but sometimes Amazon's or NCSA's).

Adam

On Mon, Apr 5, 2021 at 6:46 AM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:

> On Sat, Apr 03, 2021 at 07:23:56PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> >
> > I'm the biggest SunOS 4.x fan boy and I agree.  It was ~30 years ago.
> > Back then, all the open source stuff, or closed source stuff, took a
> > ton of work to make it work.  It just worked on SunOS.  I can't tell
> > you how many times I've brought up X10 or X11 on all sorts of systems
> > (it was a good learning experience, you learned to figure out that this
> > is part of my graphics card, this and that and that and that is not,
> > just ifdef that out and keep going).
>
> To be fair, a lot of that was because there's a lot of crappy
> userspace software out there who assumed that all the world's a Sun
> (running SunOS).  Previously it was Vax running BSD 4.x, and it's been
> superceded these days with "all the world's Linux (running on x86_64)".
>
> I'm a big Linux fan boy, but that doesn't blind me to the fact that
> that there's a lot of cr*p that uses slow, maddening autoconf and
> automake build systems, yet have so many Linux'isms in it that won't
> build anywhere else.
>
> The fact that a lot of software easily brings up on a particular OS
> doesn't mean that it's inherently better; just that it has the
> dominant mindshare.
>
>                                                 - Ted
>