You're right but it's broader than "C folks like terseness."
C is famously hard to read. Before Perl we used to joke that C is a write-only language: you can't understand what your own code means just weeks later.
Combine this with its lack of bounds checking, pointer arithmetic, and other dangerous features, and the result is a language that's macho for geeks: it's hard, it's dangerous, but it's small and it's fast.
It's a motorcycle for nerds. Ada is a tank.
Nerds get to establish dominance over lesser nerds by doing hard stuff in hard languages and making it fast. This bestows nerd street cred: geek cred.
Ada was used by contractors who needed stuff to work and money was no object.
C was used by hackers to do cool hacker stuff that was perceived to be fast and low level.
It's not low level: machine architectures haven't resembled the C abstractions since the 1970s.
It's a gratuitously overcomplex implementation of a relatively simple concept which uses opaque complex tooling to fake a filesystem, lying to the user about what's on their disk, in ways that are so baroque only because its primary corporate sponsor does not have a COW-snapshot filesystem in its flagship distro.
There are alternative tools that do all it does in simpler, cleaner, more understandable ways, with better tools that are also smaller and simpler. openSUSE, ChromeOS, Nix, Guix, and indeed, TinyCore all achieve the same goal with tooling that is about 1% of the size or complexity.
Unix is about being small and simple and clean. This is its core design principle. Ostree is none of these.
> openSUSE, ChromeOS, Nix, Guix, and indeed, TinyCore all achieve the same goal with tooling that is about 1% of the size or complexity
Those make very specific tradeoffs to do what they do.
OpenSUSE needs a snapshotting filesystem, and uses btrfs. ChromeOS needs doubled up partitions and can only keep 2 versions. I profoundly disagree that nix and guix are simpler than... almost anything, actually. They're great, but they turn the entire world inside out to do it. Not familiar with TinyCore so can't comment.
This shouldn't be read as a strong defense of ostree, mind, just that every single option appears to have significant tradeoffs thus far.
It's all tradeoffs all the way down, like the rest of 21st century computing.
The thing is that there is a widespread mindset of "hey look, this family of distros has been offering immutable distros for quite a while and it has multiple flavours and it's from a well-known vendor, therefore it must be the best and most mature, right?"
(Obviously I caricature but I think it's a valid one.)
RH makes a lot of noise and does a lot of promotion and FOSS folks are even worse than the general audience at distinguishing hype from fact, because (1) they're not used to being marketed at and (b) much of the entire Unix world runs on familial loyalty and tribalism and it has done since the 1970s. Compare Vi vs Emacs, or C vs C++, or RPM vs DEB, or GNOME vs KDE, and a thousand other examples.
I worked for both RH and SUSE. I've directly personally seen the company mindsets from the inside. RH is akin to a religion and has a profound entrenched culture of disdain for all other vendors' offerings. I've rarely seen anything else quite like it except for the more rabid of Apple (and to a degree Microsoft) fanboys. It is, incidentally, a characteristic of the company culture to deny this to outsiders, but I went through the training and the acculturation.
It's all about compromise. As such it is important to acknowledge that different sets of compromises are possible.
ChromeOS works and for all its perceived flaws, it's out there on hundreds of millions of user-facing PCs. It started to outsell Macs in the USA in 2017 and by the COVID pandemic did so worldwide. By sales value, not unit sales. IOW multiply the differential by at least 5x.
Sure it sounds limited, but limited and extremely robust with massive field-proven resilience is more important than a tiny but loud niche.
Of course, when one says this, the tiny but loud niche will be enraged.
> "Oberon is an operating system" was indeed evident,
No, it is not evident: this is not correct.
Oberon is bare-metal self-hosted programming system. It is both a language and an OS.
> why do we care about this one in particular?
1. It is the final development in the career of Niklaus Wirth, the creator of Pascal. Pascal is the Wirthian language that had considerable commercial success.
(A dialect called the USCD p-System was one of the original 3 OSes that IBM offered for the PC, for instance. Apple created Object Pascal, and implemented parts of the Lisa and original Mac OSes in it. In the early days of DOS, Borland TurboPascal was one of the leading IDEs, and then when 16-bit Windows achieved commercial success, Borland's Delphi led the way as the most sophisticated Windows IDE.)
2. It's the end of his life's work. Wirth did not stop with Pascal.
The next generation was Modula. It was a bit of a flop, but the successor, Modula-2, was a hugely influential language too. Topspeed Modula-2 was at one time the fastest compiler of all kinds for the PC.
Development did not end there.
Others did Modula-3, not Wirth. He moved on to create Oberon.
3. This is the end of the line of the single most widespread and influential family of programming languages outside of the C world.
> What does it do that other operating systems don't?
Wirth was a keen advocate of small size and simplicity.
Oberon is one of the smallest simplest compiled languages of all time. It is also an OS, and an ID, and a tiled mouse-controlled windowing system. The core is about 4000 lines of code.
4k LOC.
The entire core OS is smaller than the tiniest trivial shell tool on any FOSS Unix.
It is almost unbelievably tiny, it is fast, and it is self-hosting. It can run bare-metal, on multiple platforms, or as a conventional language under another OS. It has its own GUI. It can interop with other languages. You can, and people do, build complete GUI apps in Oberon.
It may be less well-known than its own ancestors but this is an important, significant language, and the final generation of a very important and very much alive dynasty.
Borland Turbo Pascal for CP/M and MS-DOS was developed by Anders Hejlsberg, who went on to develop All The Languages for Microsoft.
Perhaps more surprisingly, Turbo Modula 2 for CP/M (which was certainly surpassed by Topspeed Modula 2) was developed by Martin Odersky, who created Scala.
Throw in Robert Griesemer and his co-creation of Go, and the Wirth family tree is as influential in modern programming as it possibly could be.
No, it is not correct, and trying to coerce it into the reductive box of an incomplete view does not help.
Comparison: you are angrily maintaining "Orange is a colour! It is right there in the rainbow! Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet! It's a colour! That is the set to which it belongs!"
It is true. But it is incomplete.
It is also a fruit. It belongs equally in "apple, orange, banana, pear, quince."
Also a valid set; no parallel.
It is in other sets too. The set of citrus fruits. "Lemon, orange, lime, pomelo, grapefruit."
Oberon is a programming language.
It is also a set of frameworks. They are integral.
It is also an editor.
It is also a UI design.
It is also an OS.
Any one is true but is incomplete.
There are other views but yours and none is privileged; yours does not invalidate the others, nor they yours. You only see one but your view is too narrow.
You are keen to rebut me, but you have not refuted me. Provide evidence for your case. Don't tell me I am wrong, because I've had decades of that and I don't care. Show me I am wrong and I will listen.
The latter is lifted from “The School of Niklaus Wirth:
The Art of Simplicity,” which is a worthwhile volume for anyone with an interest in this stuff.
Being provincial. Assuming sentients look and act like us, whoever "us" is. (Cf. whales, or elephants.) Assuming that what "we" do is the right, proper way to do things and anything else is inferior.
If you really need to enumerate examples you can just say "does it have FTL travel? Don't look Aperocky! Your head will explode!". Plenty more examples...
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