There are quite a few experiments they did which I consider to be methodologically unsound. It doesn't necessarily even change the correct result. I understand the limitations of the show, but they do kind of undermine the whole point at times.

@devphobe Except, if there are entirely legitimate uses of the words without the connotations you condemn, why should we abandon the words entirely? That results in losing meaning unnecessarily for the sake of pacifying ignorant complaints. I much prefer educational explanation to arbitrary compromise on meaning.

@devphobe Assuming you would offend an entire class of people is exactly the sort of thinking you claim to be attacking, just in the opposite direction.

@simulate I'm watching the project with much interest as well.

I was sold on Plan9 by a combination of things: reinforcement of how terrible Unix could be (the UNIX-Haters handbook, out of date, but not entirely irrelevant, even now) and a presentation (slides only) of how Plan9 made networking and device drivers system-native through making them communicate like file servers (proper "everything is a file" instead of the Unix bolt-ons for multi-user and networking).

Other, nob-Plan9-related OSes I like that deserve more attention (and I have no idea if you're aware of them): ReactOS (clean-room reimplementation of Windows), AROS (one of several continuations of Amiga OS), and Haiku (open source reimplementation of BeOS). And another historical one for inspiration: KEYKOS (although the code-name, Grand New Operating System In The Sky, or GNOSIS, was better). Docs for that are also findable.

@simulate Plan 9 was the successor project to Unix at Bell Labs. It was basically a refinement of the Unix ideas to (basically) as far as they would go. Basically everything had to talk to everything else through the same protocol (D-Bus is heavily inspired by it), the architecture eliminated a lot of security stuff we still deal with (system namespaces for isolating resources), and true distributed computing was possible with how the system handled networking and system resources. All the docs are still archived online if you want a closer look. Sadly, modern device drivers are almost non-existent, although there's still a French system running a variant.

Modern projects to look at: Harvey (an attempt at a modern reimplementation) is somewhat actively maintained, and Redox OS (written in Rust) is heavily inspired by Plan9. Linux has adopted quite a few of Plan9's ideas, and there are ports of the tools, too. ("Plan9 from userspace")

I'd really like to see some form of Plan9 get any sort of traction these days, because architecturally it's amazing. It's unlikely, I know.

@AlmondSauce It's not like that computer has anything better to do anyway...

@heyheni I'd like to say that D would be more likely, but D doesn't really have any major corporate backers, despite having really good mindshare on the core team.

@Condor Since when is meaningful work the only necessary thing?

@Midnigh-shcode So you don't think a JS VM that can run Win 95 is necessary?

@Midnigh-shcode It's a challenge along the lines of, "can I do that?" which people might find interesting. Just because you have other standards that get in the way of your appreciation of such things...

One person's bloat is another person's necessary feature.

@hasu Apparently the drive hates that format enough to do something about it.

@Midnigh-shcode For everyone who takes the time to ask "why?" there will be someone who simply does. Why? Because it's an interesting challenge, or even just because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

@Midnigh-shcode There exists some difference between "readable" and "high quality."

@Gregozor2121 And I was just nit-picking how you said it, not necessarily taking you seriously.

@Gregozor2121 If your life goal is next, either you're doing way better than most people or you haven't seriously analyzed how to get there and broken it down properly.

To make things even more depressing, every time you make something idiot-proof someone will make a better idiot.

@SevenDeadlyBugs OSX also has random stupid features as part of the apparatus for consuming weed, almost as if they don't quite understand how to make weed-consumption tools competently. They also discourage third-party modification/repair of their equipment and spoke their weed so that it won't burn properly in third-party equipment.

It might mean that someone doesn't understand what static linking means.

Sounds like a joke I would make, but not during an interview.

There are things like LESS and SASS, which are basically things that convert to CSS before publication (there is at least one more that I have forgotten, but it's much less common than the others). You might find one of those more friendly, although you'll still need to know some "normal" CSS so you can troubleshoot when something comes out differently than intended.

@OneOfSimpleMind If it makes you feel better to think about it that way, sure...

@Gregozor2121 True, but you can run all of the software that makes up Proton independently as well. It's all just a matter of time before the other launchers work okay on Linux, too.

@freshHeir Now I'm not trying to say that the new Mac Pro is going to be anything like what I described, just that I have gotten other computer configurations to similar prices and didn't say "that's unreasonable."

@freshHeir Every now and then I like to check out what I can do with fancy workstation configurations. A few years ago I maxed out a Falcon Northwest with Nvidia Tesla cards and the price was over $50,000. It also qualified as a desktop super computer (in terms of tera-FLOPS) so I didn't think it was an unreasonable price, but I probably wouldn't want a workstation that loaded, because it's too portable for the price. (Easy to walk away from where it's supposed to be.)

@JhonDoe Valve has been leading the charge recently with Proton (a combination of dxvk, wine, and other magic api translation libraries). Much of Steam's library just works now, and compatibility is improving rapidly. That said, there's always room for improvement, and your mileage may vary.

It's basically been this last year that things have gotten so much better, so if you haven't tried in a while it might be worth another look.

@Jilano But then we'd be generalizing more than the context of this discussion warrants.

Laws make people do stupid things sometimes.

If the advice I offered sounded like I intended it to be a general principle for everyone, I apologize. I was responding to OP as to what I would recommend for someone thinking like OP. In most cases, good ideas are never original, and can be surprisingly widespread (almost every major technology had multiple people working on it simultaneously, we just forget that out of a misplaced desire to give special honor to someone who got there "first"). As you said, most people are never going to do anything about them anyway.

It's also permission, because there's a significant legal difference between looking at source code and disassembling binaries. They're explaining that they're not going to sue over the binaries, despite having the right to do so.