Rant

And a great deal of software written on top of that hardware support to automagically configure and utilize said hardware.

> CD/RW were a nightmare and were the only rewriteable mass storage media.

Nightmare how? At worst they were about the same as using them under Windows.

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

Webcams remain an ongoing source of joy, because even within that "standard" there's plenty of rope for manufacturers to hang themselves with, and the list of workarounds is a mile long at this point.

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

No, when it came to actual hardware, drivers, and low-level OS manipulation, there were never any UNIX conventions. Every UNIX had its own way of doing those things. And still does. (Even the "everything is a file" abstraction wasn't ever true)

Meanwhile, beyond POSIX, there wasn't any meaningful conventions for building higher-order systems. Sessions? IPC? Everyone had their own mechanisms, none compatible. Even from a GUI perspective, beyond raw xlib, you had nothing you could count on being universal.