Most of the apps I work with these days keep state on remote servers, and that state doesn’t always map nicely to a folders and files metaphor, or documents.

The Star was quite inconvenient to work with - and worked with removable media via an import/export metaphor. Also, it had very little of the direct manipulation of desktop objects the Lisa introduced. It knew no drag, only point and click. Ironically, we can say that drag-less UI was a drag.

That’s really neat.

It was a Unix. I believe the distinctive feature is not what it did, but what it didn’t - crash often.

It was a fascinating idea - programs were hidden behind a document template metaphor. It was not as neat as Windows “New” menu and its templates folder.

Xenix is the best operating system Microsoft ever shipped, but they gave up on it because there was no way they could use their PC leverage to corner the Unix market.

> That said, DIMMs and the whole bus idea is in dire need of getting a new type of bearing.

IBM has been using their own memory bus technology for both their POWER and Z machines. IIRC, it’s somewhat reminiscent of CXL, trading latency for bandwidth and size.

I think the reasoning is better thermals and signal stability. The physics of the first seem to be that there is more metal to capture and distribute heat, but the signal integrity part beats me. By having better thermals, they can increase the memory clock and, thus, bandwidth and reduce latency.

Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX also maintain excellent backwards binary compatibility, as do the less Unixy z/OS and OpenVMS.

Even though z/OS is officially a Unix.

For every version between 3.5 and 10.

> With Linux, you have to target specific distros, do something insane like a giant bundle of everything,

This is what you do for Flatpack, Steam, or Docker. All these are popular options.

> Oh and I almost forgot.. install scripts that detect distros, install dependencies.

Most distros offer tooling to make packages for their package managers. With them you declare the dependencies you want and the package manager does the rest.

> And god help you if you need to ship a kernel module.

The right way to do it is to open source it and let the installer compile the software against the kernel headers. Sysdig and VirtualBox do that.

> when you have only 32 GB for a 16 core/32 thread CPU, you must reduce the number of concurrent compilations

Also, depending on the architecture, avoiding odd(or even) virtual cores might free more L2 or L3 for the worker threads and speed up the process.

Canonical has a tradition of inventing something that’s ahead of its time only to see nobody else is going the same way as they are. Sometimes they realise it was a mistake and follow everyone else.

Juju had a different problem: it was big-bang rewritten in Go and that froze features for too long for them to keep their mindshare. Rewriting was the right decision, as Python had poor concurrency back then, but doing that while freezing features was a mistake.