this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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What's wrong with it?
$PATH
shouldn't even be a thing, as today disk space is cheap so there is no need to scatter binaries all over the place.Historically,
/usr
was created so that you could mount a new disk here and have more binaries installed on your system when the disk with/bin
was full.And there are just so many other stuff like that which doesn't make sense anymore (
/var/tmp
comes to mind,/opt
,/home
which was supposed to be/usr
but name was already taken, etc ...).How would virtual environment software, like conda, work without $PATH?
Today's software would probably break, but my point is that
$PATH
is a relic from ancient times that solved a problem we don't have anymore.