On Mon, 20 Feb 2017, Steve Johnson wrote:

> As far as stability and portability is concerned, GNU is a disaster.  
> Even when a feature is the same across different architectures the 
> option names and values are often different. In one company I worked for 
> we had two releases nearly derailed because of Linux/GCC issues.  In one 
> case, the way locales worked was different between different versions of 
> Linux.  In another case, GCC simply silently removed an option that we 
> depended on and we nearly shipped a product that would have bombed out 
> if the user had already upgraded to the newest GCC.

I'm no fan of GNU either, and have long considered doing a GNU-less, 
SysV-flavored Linux distribution as a reaction to all things that annoy me 
about GNU.

> In terms of following the Unix philosophy, the widow managers on Linux 
> are getting more bizarre by the year.  Hitting a key at random by 
> mistake can cause windows to disappear, screens of unknown utility to 
> appear, everything to disappear, etc.  Setting options to try to achieve 
> some kind of consistency is totally different in each system.  Etc. 
> etc.   There seems to be no larger organizing principle at work...

Which is probably truer than you realize.

-uso.