---
title: Unix-like operating systems
date: 2025-09-21
author: Wickramage Don Sadeep Madurange
layout: post
---

The Unix operating system project appears to have started in 1969 at Bell Labs.
Something resembling contemporary Unix-like systems may have been developed in
1973 when Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson rewrote the Unix kernel in C. Both of
these important milestones, unfortunately, predate me by a number of years.

Nevertheless, operating systems created in the image of Unix and, more
importantly, that inherit its philosophy, have survived. Linux and OpenBSD are
two such systems that I am personally familiar with.

Operating systems like OpenBSD and Linux are free and open-source alternatives
to commercial operating systems such as Apple macOS and Microsoft Windows.
OpenBSD is developed by a group of hackers led by Theo de Raadt. Linux is
community-driven, although, increasingly and ironically, under the stewardship
of corporations such as IBM and Microsoft.

Commercial operating systems, and the corporations behind them, are becoming
increasily hostile towards their users. Viewing their users merely as a means
to an end, the unbridled harvesting of personal data for targetted advertising,
influencing the behavior of the masses, and training generative neural networks
has become their primary objective. the book 'The Age of Surveillance
Capitalism' by Professor Shoshana Zuboff documents in detail unassailable
evidence and poignant consequences of the surveillance activities by these
corporations.

Conversely, Unix-like operating systems are open to the user to use them as
they deem fit. They do not spy on their users, sell hidden agendas, and some,
like OpenBSD, do not show commercial interests whatsoever. The following is a
screenshot of my custom Arch Linux setup in 2020. It uses X display server and
i3 for window management, Urxvt terminal emulator made translucent with the
help of the Xcompmgr compositor.

![Arch Linux](linux.png)

The following is an equivalent setup on OpenBSD from my 2024 desktop:

![OpenBSD i3](openbsd.png)

This degree of customization is impossible with commercial operating systems.
The operating system vendor sets firm boundaries around how the machine should
be used. As a consequence, the user is forced to suffer slow animations,
arrangement of windows, and blatant infringements of privacy.

The conceptual elegance and technological superiority of Unix-like operating
systems lie in how programs developed independently come together to accomplish
complex tasks. For instance, to read and reply to an HTML email on OpenBSD,
Mutt, my email client, requests credentials from Pass, which retrieves
credentials and requests GPG to decrypt them. With the decrypted credentials
Mutt fetches the email, opens the Lynx browser to render the HTML content. To
reply, I press Shift+R key, which opens Vim, the text editor I use for all my
text editing tasks. I prepare the reply and press 'y' to dispatch it.

The entire process of handing control from one program to another is seamless
and instantaneous. The magic is in the fact each of these programs are
developed by different programmers, without so much as exchanging an email to
make sure that they can interoperate. In fact, none of these programs were
designed to interoperate for the specific use case of sending an email. The
interoperability is a direct consequence of how Unix was designed.

Files: [dotfiles.tar.gz](dotfiles.tar.gz)