Comment by spijdar

That probably came off a bit too inflammatory/self-deprecating :)

The point for me was realizing that, even though I do like all these systems and OSes, and I understand the appeal of both "pure UNIX" and (on the opposite spectrum) OSes that violently reject "UNIX", this kind of purity isn't actually... useful.

End of the day, with most of the ways I use a computer for productivity, playing, or being social with other people, there are other things that matter a lot more than the "purity" of the OS. And this includes how much "real UNIX" it is. It's cool that Solaris/Illumos is "true blooded unix". And... it doesn't really matter that much. Whether or not a system is or isn't "unix" just doesn't matter, as long as it runs the software you want.

(And for a lot of modern software, "being unix-like" isn't enough; if you're not Linux, Windows, or macOS, good luck!)

The purity is also usually kind of a lie in the first place. I've got a VAX in my office running "real" 4.3BSD, before all the "POSIX-bloat" was added. But you look closely and realize there's tons of "bloat" added, for the purpose of making a more useful OS. There are mixed abstractions, redundant libc extensions, dubious system additions that look like one person needed something and added it in.

It's just so uninteresting to me now to argue about what is or isn't "unix". I still enjoy all those old OSes, but you kind of stop seeing them as "UNIX". The ways that each isn't UNIX is far more interesting, like how ULTRIX and OSF/1 abandoned "unix style" syslogs in favor of a rich binary format via 'uerf'.