Hence why Solaris, HP-UX, and OS X are the UNIXes I had/have more fun using.
I read almost everything I could about NeXTSTEP and Irix, and had access to a Cube during last university year, as we were porting software originally developed on it to Windows, but sadly no longer working state.
What all those UNIXes have that Linux/BSD kind of miss with their fragmentation, although Raspberry PI kind of has it, it is the soul of the machine, a whole stack experience, the hardware, software, desktop, programming environment, combined together on a full end to end experience.
I agree with this sentiment quite a lot. Solaris and IRIX have very special places in my heart (Solaris especially). Yet, Linux has two things that no other *nix system has had: unbelievable momentum and availability. It doesn’t quite have the elegance, the polish, or the charm of Solaris or IRIX or even … AIX, but it’s something I can use on almost anything, and it’s super easy easy to get my hands on.
One of the first things I did when setting up a Solaris desktop was to install a new window manager and configure my login to use it. I found both CDE and OpenWin to be awful.
Using Emacs and EXWM it's a different approach to Unix, which I almost use it
as a 'debugging/maintenance' tool for 'low' level stuff, for instance running pacman to upgrade the system from a TTY, or managing services such as the nntp and mail MUA/MTA backend for mu4e and GNUs. As DDT and Emacs users did back in the day, such as RMS on the ITS.
I mean, not using Unix as an interface, but as an underlying system with a very small userland.
I read almost everything I could about NeXTSTEP and Irix, and had access to a Cube during last university year, as we were porting software originally developed on it to Windows, but sadly no longer working state.
What all those UNIXes have that Linux/BSD kind of miss with their fragmentation, although Raspberry PI kind of has it, it is the soul of the machine, a whole stack experience, the hardware, software, desktop, programming environment, combined together on a full end to end experience.