Women in Technology

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Weblog:		The end of imitation
Subject:		Linux improves some aspects of clunky UNIX as well
Date:		2004-06-17 10:40:47
From:		GJJ

I work with some Unix systems on a daily basis that were created by a commercial provider. They are all-right, but the fact they are so expensive and only used by a relatively small populace shows almost daily. Contrast that with Linux, that is used daily by a comparitively large population... improvements of things that populace HATES about commercial UNIX can be expected... and not just on the desktop. How about a version of vi that can handle extremely HUGE files. We rip out the commercial version and install the GNU version for the ability to do our daily work. How about nice little switches (like -h for the df command) that make life just a little bit more sane. These are all end-user improvements in those "clunky non-desktop core unix tools" that are a blessing. You can tell that they were created by people that said "there has to be a better way" and then either created it or pestered someone else to add it to their project. And I thank, for one, thank them for it. Sure the Linux Desktop gets a lot of press these days (as it should... I use Linux as a very powerful and functional desktop every day), but we should also bend a knee for those that toiled at making the "UNIX side" of Linux more friendly and useable.

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Linux improves some aspects of clunky UNIX as well
2004-06-17 16:39:30 GeneW [View]

I agree, the tools included with Linux are in general so much better than those included with commersial unixes. I'm always trying to use a handy option for a tool on Solaris and then remembering that that option is only on the Gnu/Linux version. The recursive '-r' option on Grep is a great example of an improvement that the free implementation has and the 'real' one doesn't. That's a trivial example but it shows how open source tools often go that little extra to make things more friendly where the commersial equivalents don't bother. It would take a fairly trivial amount of effort for Sun to add that functionality but it's just not worth their time. I think that it has a lot to do with the fact that open source developers are users also.

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