I like thinking about operating systems, and I am sympathetic to the notion that things could be better than UNIX, but there's some real gibberish in this article.
"Both have flat, useless WIMP GUIs;" ... this has nothing at all to do with UNIX - you don't need a GUI at all in UNIX (which is great) and there are MANY non-WIMP operating environments available - many of which are serious, sophisticated, current offerings.
"Neither has a programmable GUI." False. ion3, for instance, which is one of the many available non-WIMP environments I mentioned above, is completely programmable with lua. I am sure there are 100 other examples.
"Neither is versioned, both are irreversibly destructive." Hard to say exactly what is being pointed out here, but I think it's related to filesystems and going backwards ... and ZFS provides that just fine with snapshots. In fact, even UFS2 has filesystem snapshots. Available on FreeBSD, Solaris, and many others ... including Linux.
"Neither takes account of any modern research" ... again, previously mentioned ZFS ... that's as modern as it gets. netgraph in FreeBSD also comes to mind as something genuinely inventive, unique and modern.
"You can't learn programming from either Unix or Windows." Inasmuch as I would consider the UNIX shell as part of UNIX, you absolutely can learn to program. Further, inasmuch as DOS batch files are part of Windows, you can learn to program there as well. I certainly did.
In the 90's, don't know when exactly. I remember when this site was active :) Showing my age. Back when wikis were new and /. was the nerd forum of choice. Ah those heady times.
But seriously, this pre-dates ZFS for sure and ion3 I don't know about.
I am not sure when it was written, but it references "WimpIsBroken" article on the same page. That article has been updated to also bash Windows 8 design. So, if not written, then it must have been at least updated somewhat recently. So I am guessing the author still agrees with all of his points of view.
"Both have flat, useless WIMP GUIs;" ... this has nothing at all to do with UNIX - you don't need a GUI at all in UNIX (which is great) and there are MANY non-WIMP operating environments available - many of which are serious, sophisticated, current offerings.
"Neither has a programmable GUI." False. ion3, for instance, which is one of the many available non-WIMP environments I mentioned above, is completely programmable with lua. I am sure there are 100 other examples.
"Neither is versioned, both are irreversibly destructive." Hard to say exactly what is being pointed out here, but I think it's related to filesystems and going backwards ... and ZFS provides that just fine with snapshots. In fact, even UFS2 has filesystem snapshots. Available on FreeBSD, Solaris, and many others ... including Linux.
"Neither takes account of any modern research" ... again, previously mentioned ZFS ... that's as modern as it gets. netgraph in FreeBSD also comes to mind as something genuinely inventive, unique and modern.
"You can't learn programming from either Unix or Windows." Inasmuch as I would consider the UNIX shell as part of UNIX, you absolutely can learn to program. Further, inasmuch as DOS batch files are part of Windows, you can learn to program there as well. I certainly did.
When was this written ?