Rant

People keep talking of the modern Gnome/Unity/whatever desktop as "progress", saying remember what it used to be like to use a Linux desktop/laptop, everything "just works" now, therefore just roll over when we nuke the old Unix ways.

This is an utter myth.

Yes, the modern Linux desktop "just works" but that's entirely due to hardware support.

Winmodems were a nightmare. But nobody uses modems anymore.

CD/RW were a nightmare and were the only rewriteable mass storage media. For over 10 years now everyone uses USB mass storage, all devices follow the same protocol, that problem simply went away.

Similarly with webcams, when they all started following a standard USB interface.

Similarly with pretty much all the hardware that one used to fight with. The progress is because of standardisation on hardware interfaces (across various versions of Window and Mac).

I am not at all discounting the efforts of the kernel developers (and, in some cases, hardware manufacturers) in making sure all these things work perfectly. It is a huge and impressive effort. If it weren't, the BSDs would be competitive with Linux on the desktop and laptop. That they aren't is due entirely to hardware support. (And, ironically, the BSDs supported USB before Linux did. Yet, from my experience, FreeBSD continued to crash reliably when using USB media, well into the 2000s.)

But: NONE OF THIS PROGRESS CAN BE CREDITED TO BREAKING LONGSTANDING UNIX CONVENTIONS.

Many of us were used to Ctrl-Alt-Bksp killing the X session. It was convenient, it is an unlikely key combination to hit accidentally. But some people decided it was dangerous. Well, ok.

Many of us were used to Ctrl-Alt-Function keys giving you consoles. That got disabled too for reasons I don't understand. Well, ok.

But the acquiescence is, I think, more from "this is not worth fighting over" or "too few people really care about this", not so much from "this is an intelligent decision and we should go with it".

When you start killing processes on logout, it's a whole different matter. It affects huge numbers of users who have been brought up on the "Unix way". Not just convenience, but actual work. You risk losing days or weeks of work because you forgot that the powers-that-be changed how basic practices work.

Demanding that commands like nohup, screen, tmux and numerous in-house applications adapt to the new reality, because this is what Gnome developers have decided that Gnome users want, is unbelievable arrogance.

Arguing that all these programs can be trivially fixed (how trivially?) misses the point.

The BSDs have a term, POLA ("principle of least astonishment"), that serves as a policy principle for this sort of thing. Linus has something similar for API breakage in the kernel. Even Microsoft works incredibly hard to ensure compatibility across Windows versions.

Destroying decades-old practice in this manner is complete disrespect for the longest-standing and most loyal users. There is no other way to put it.