Post by @atzanteol@sh.itjust.works

@atzanteol@sh.itjust.works

2026-10-27 16:59 UTC

The Unix principle is the most over-rated design principle ever. It’s sole purpose is to be dragged out when somebody doesn’t like your application. Notably the systemd haters don’t levy the same complaint about Wayland… It’s based on the idea of programs as “functions” that can be strung together like you often do with things like “cat /etc/passwd | grep user | tr ‘s/:/,/’” (cat put in there to trigger the right people). That’s a great philosophy for cli utilities. But it’s not universally applicable. The goal is not to make things tiny but to make them “the right size.” You wouldn’t want to run 30 different applications to do what GIMP does and you shouldn’t have to. And the idea of having dozens of viable replacements for different functions is not a Unix thing but pretty restricted to the Linux ecosystem. And it’s not like it was planned, it just happened because 12 people went out and wrote their own ntp daemons. There wasn’t really much benefit to it. “Oh boy, I can run a different ntpd… And half of them are partially implemented. Hooray?”

Replies (3)

@undrwater@lemmy.world 2026-10-27 19:40

That’s a great philosophy for cli utilities. I think this might be the crux of the argument. Wayland is certainly not a cli utility, so there’s no need to argue if or how it impacts that environment. I’m quite familiar with openRC, so when I was introduced to systemd, it felt quite awkward. I use both, but still prefer openRC, maybe still due to familiarity. If I’m operating in an WM or DE, it doesn’t really matter that much. It’s been over a decade since I’ve run an ntp daemon. 😉

Open ##5275121
@jdr@lemmy.ml 2026-10-27 21:30

I hate Wayland and Systemd. You’re allowed to have programs whose job is to coordinate other programs. You could totally have a version of gimo that just runs whatever separate program on the buffer.

Open ##5276497
@iopq@lemmy.world 2026-11-02 08:40

Listen, when I edit a video, the video editor literally just calls ffmpeg. They don’t implement the features that already exist. The Unix principle is real in GUI programs.

Open ##5467018