[OpenIndiana-discuss] What belongs in a general purpose O/S?

[Andreas Wacknitz]

Am 20.08.25 um 09:22 schrieb Carl Brewer via openindiana-discuss:
>
> My background, in the 1980's and 1990's I was a UNIX and network 
> sysadmin, cut my teeth on SunOS 4.1, argued with Sun incessantly about 
> the evils of SVr4 and SunOS 5 (the first few years, were really, 
> really bad)
>
> Always compiled my own stuff from source.
>
> I have a question for the group.
>
> What actually belongs in an operating system?
>
> I see, or at least I think I see, a lot of effort on various 
> platforms, to maintain applications (gimp? really? bundled?!), and 
> when humans are scarce, is this at the expense of device drivers, 
> installation systems and so on?
>
> For a little while, I recall one of the *BSD ports systems being used 
> on some versions of SunOS 5.10+ (correct me if I'm wrong), which 
> seemed a good pathway to take, but now we seem to have this weird IPS 
> thingo and all the barriers to entry that it introduces.  Every damn 
> UNIX/clone system has its own awful system for 
> ports/packages/dependency mess making and they *all* suck.
>
> Anyway, enough preamble ...
>
> An O/S (general purpose), must include :
>
> Compiler(s) and standard libraries for the common languages (C/C++ 
> etc, whatever GCC calls itself these days) so you can compile the 
> system on itself.
> Scripting languages (sh, perl, python)
> shells (sh, csh, tsch, bash etc)
> A set of robust device drivers that 'just work' (this is 2025, you 
> shouldn't need to go futzing around to find the right driver for your 
> video card, it should *just work*)
> A sane, sensible, simple install setup that works on modern hardware 
> without hacks. This, these days, means all the various BIOS stuff on 
> PC hardware shouldn't need weirdness to work.
> Backup solution (borg? tar, zfs send etc)
> A bombproof filesystem that supports auto up and downsizing etc (ZFS 
> is pretty close to perfect) and is cross-platform (hrm, it sorta is, 
> but then there's ZFS features, and they're not standard anymore, it 
> *might* work ... )
> Some sort of sensible firewall and tripwire'ish solution. Something 
> that makes FTP (ha!) "just work" etc.
> System performance monitoring (top, ntop, nagios plugins,  the 
> standards that we all use)
>
> I don't think there'd be too much dissent wrt that list. Where it gets 
> interesting is what then gets bundled in, and how?
>
> Should, for example, apache be bundled in? With the maintenance issues 
> that this brings with it? Should VLC? Should Firefox or some other 
> browser?  If it's a desktop system, you'd want FF and Thunderbird or 
> similar, some reasonable version of TWM (golly, I am old!) but for a 
> server?  I don't know where you draw the lines, but it does look like 
> "we" spend a lot of time farting around with applications that really, 
> aren't up to a niche community to support. I use VirtualBox on my O/I 
> servers, but should it be bundled, or something that we get with 
> source and compile ourselves?
>
> I dunno .. Just rambling on a Wednesday arvo ;)
>
> Carl
>
>
Operating systems of today are usually not for all-purpose use but 
specialised. The times where servers simply provided printer, storage, 
or compute services are gone, or at least, have quite different 
characteristics.

Desktop users have other expectations than server users. My experience 
is that all users (be it desktop users or server users (= administrators 
or their bosses) usually don't care about what you wrote - they simply 
expect them to be there.

On top of that they have quite different expectations on the systems, eg.

Desktop users: energy efficiency, availability of all the hardware 
(cameras, mics, keyboards, ...) and software they want to use (word 
processing, spreadsheet, planning, video conferences, ...). So even 
firefox and thunderbird aren't good enough. For every area you'll also 
need a bunch of alternatives because people don't want to learn new 
things but simply want to continue what they are used to.

Server users can be separated into own categories, eg. storage and 
virtualisation/compute with similar expectations but slightly different 
technical consequences:
high availability (automatic failover, load balancing, planned 
maintenance schedules), simple and mostly automated hardware 
replacements in case of failures, easy and mostly automated capacity or 
availability enhancements (simply add a new node by plugging all needed 
network cables and power supplies).

So, after initial planning and setup nobody wants to care for the 
technical details.

Eg. at work we have a bunch of separated networks in our data centres 
with at least one for administration, one for internal communication 
(hypervisors, storage), one for storage access and one or more for the 
applications that are running on the hypervisors). Thus, network 
virtualisation ("software defined networks") is a big thing.
This is all to achieve security, availability, and scalability of the 
provided services.

Andreas