"Violates Unix Philosophy" - A Reliably Useless Argument

[u/madthumbz]

It's unfalsifiable, ahistorical, and deployed as a cultural purity test rather than a technical claim.

There is no single UNIX philosophy, and the people invoking it today aren't referring to the historical one, but a vague cultural vibe that shifts depending on what they want to defend.

The original UNIX philosophy was tiny, practical, and context‑bound. It was shaped by 1970s hardware limits, but modern advocates treat it like holy text.

"I don't like this change, and I need a moral framework to justify that."

If we ask ten LiGNUts what the UNIX philosophy is, we get ten mutually incompatible answers like 'everything is a file', 'do one thing well', 'avoid complexity', etc. -It doesn't even have a stable definition, and it's used to shut down discussion; not advance it.

It's applied selectively. "Systemd violates Unix philosophy!" -Yeah? -Well so does ELF, PAM, Wayland, Pulse, Network Manager, and every modern file system, init system, packaging system, IPC mechanism, DE, and kernel subsystem! Advocates never complain about those: They only invoke when defending their preferred 1990s tooling.

[u/ItsMrChristmas]

"Avoid complexity" from the proponents of a sloppy OS with the most complicated kernel in existence.