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$ To set up this Unix system, do I really have to type long, cryptic,
frequently inconsistent and undocumented commands with occasional long strings
of hex digits?
# Yeah. You got a problem with that?
In the beginning, there were books. Before I had ever set eyes upon a Unix shell prompt, I had read Software Tools and The UNIX Programming Environment.
Then, there was Minix. There was also, unfortunately, an Amstrad
PC1386, whose keyboard was not IBM PC compatible. So that was the
end of that...
A few years later, there was a new PC — and Linux.
And then (and finally, for now), there was
OpenBSD.
Why? It "just works"; it has a complete, up-to-date, set of man pages;
it is developed the way Unix was, by a small team... I could go on; but I
suspect these things are, in the end, a matter of taste; and de gustibus
non disputandum
.
The UNIX pioneers did a pretty good job of explaining the philosophy:
This page was brought to you by ksh, vi, m4, sed & make,
courtesy of openbsd.
Last changed: Sun Mar 3 11:54:02 CET 2019