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Syllable 0.5.4 Released
AtheOSParrot writes "Version 0.5.4 of the Syllable operating system has been released. The lightweight, BeOS-alike is aimed squarely at finally realising the dream of bringing an easy-to-use, free software desktop to everyday users. 0.5.4 is a significant milestone in this direction with the integration of the new desktop, which is completely unimpeded by any legacy X-Windows foundations or toolkits beneath. This is no tin-pot bootloader with bitmaps snapped on; other features include SMP, networking, ATA/ATAPI, audio & video, 2D acceleration, GCC, USB & a 64-bit journaled FS with attributes. With desktop Linux still not having dented the 1% mark, will Syllable be the one to do to Windows what Firefox has done to IE? Also reported on OSNews.com, Golem.de and Linuxfr.org."
They should begin by changing its name
Noting like the one liner comments thrown out there as quickly as possible purely to get some free mode points getting thrown away.
.54 release, AND its making significant, rapid progress. Shouldn't you be saying something encouraging like "THANKS GUYS FOR BRING An OPEN SOURCE, X-WINDOWS FREE OS TO THE DESKTOP!"
Gee, just because anyone aims to do anything doesn't mean they will actually succeed! Its not new unless it is a 100% finished product!
Come on. Its a milestone release. Quit functional for a
Or maybe "Keep up the good work"
Sheesh, no wonder people don't finish their work, pessimists get you down!
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Nope, won't be making any real waves. Face it, BeOS is as dead as the Amiga and attempts to revive it are equally doomed.
Why?
Because there just isn't any burning need for it. Windows has all the users that money can buy, UNIX has the hearts and minds of all the elite power users and the research crowd while the Mac has the fashion police in it's camp. What demographic wants to be Be compatible? What major software base is unlocked by a Free implementation? None.
Democrat delenda est
Why is it that all these "new" operating systems (read skyOS, Syllable, etc) always just look like some crappy KDE theme? I mean, if you're going to write an entirely new operating system, and then just use *nix apps on top of it, why even bother?
well, before you say it's slow and unstable maybe you should actually install it on a box instead of under virtual PC
I'm sure your setup is subpar compared to installing and running it directly.
I just happen to have some unpartitioned space on one of my drives. I think I'll try this out sometime soon. But the screenshots make it seem as if its just like linux with a new, non-revolutionary, desktop environment. Behind the scenes it may be different, but that doesn't matter to non-geeks.
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Well, the /. article wasn't implying Linux isn't ready for the desktop... it was noting that it has yet to recieve mass adoption, which is true. I, and thousands of others, use Linux as their desktop. As you said, it works wonderfully. However, the other 6 billion people on earth don't (most of them don't use Windows either, obviously). The point here was that this is a free (OSX isn't) OS aimed at the infamous Joe User.
which is completely unimpeded by any legacy X-Windows foundations
Or legacy applications or games...
Nah, I'm just messing, I wish them luck. Maybe I'll try it out, I always had a thing for obscure OSes.
I feel the biggest reason stopping at least technically inclined people from switching from Windows to Linux is "it looks nice, but I need program XX to work." The gap between mainstream programs in windows and in linux is closing, but that has taken many years and lots of work and commitment by developers. I don't mean to negate their efforts, I just think that Windows, OSX, and Linux are giving developers enough to worry about and they don't have time to worry about another operating system.
Of course they can do whatever they want, but I wonder if they have considered that their efforts could be directed to Linux development instead. But don't get me wrong, I think they're doing a good job and their efforts should be applauded.
I think that Syllable or not, thinking of an alternative OS that has the same relationship to Windows as FireFox has to IE is exactly the right mentality.
FireFox was the browser that was supposed to be targeted at people knowledgable enough to install it, who we're limited by the IE experience.
When we talk about Desktop Linux for example, we often talk about "easy enough for my grandma to use" which is precicely the wrong litmus test. I've been idlling on a linux distro at home some, and my goal has always been to make the Linux distro that all the XP power users want to use.
Think about it. Every windows user I know who ran or runs IE has a popup blocker installed, the google toolbar, AdAware, and has half a dozen windows open most of the time. FireFox is perfect for them, because it was targeted at them. Grandma (well, not mine, she won't touch the computer, and my grandfather is a computer geek) will just click on the three icons she knows how to use - Linux, Windows, SkyOS, Syllable, Macintosh, it's all pretty colors to her. So don't target her!
I've got an OS here. It's multiuser design makes it hard to get viruses or for your sister to install spyware which screws over everybody else. It comes with a firewall, it comes with antivirus, it comes with a multiprotocol instant messeging client, it comes with a tabbed browser, it comes with a pop up blocker, it comes with a spam filter, it comes with a word processor, it comes with a spreadsheet, it comes with an image editor. It comes with all of the things you pirate to make your pirate copy of WinXP not suck, all nicely polished and working together out of the box. It's legal, it's free, it's simple, it's featureful. It doesn't dumb things down for your Grandma, it doesn't pander you with saturated colors and friendly but unhelpful error messages, it doesn't talk down to you for not already understanding everything about it. It's the OS for people who care what OS they're running.
Build it and they will come. Be it Syllable, SkyOS, Linux, BSD, or hell, Windows.
Q: Is it possible to use Syllable in a text-only mode?
A: No, you have to use the Terminal. Syllable is designed around its own GUI and cannot support a text-only interface.
Isn't that the same mistake Microsoft has been making since Windows 95?
I have been using Linux off and on as a desktop, but have been using MacOS X as my main desktop for about 2 years now. You can't even compare the two. Linux with KDE or GNOME is, no offense to those projects, barely a 9 year old child's bicycle with training wheels, while OSX is a Harley. Linux is barely at the point that Windows was with Windows 2000, and it isn't showing much signs of competing with XP-SP2 and Longhorn.
.app bundle to the hard disk, with Linux you either have to use some vendor specific tool to manage the myriad dependencies or run rpm manually. Linux is a great desktop, provided you want to only use the software that you are given by the distributor and/or have someone to maintain it for you. OSX, all that is quite unnecessary.
OSX is a very fast desktop oriented OS and it is the only desktop OS capable of really competing in a market whose needs go beyond the strictly utilitarian, like the home market. When a complete novice wants to install something from a CD on OSX all they do is drag the
I like Linux, but it really isn't there yet. The majority of the people I know at least, would be scared to death of it.
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I think, once installed, Gentoo is the best desktop distribution around. Very polished.
But why make it harder than it needs to be? If I have 12 machines in my office to install Gentoo on, why should all 12 have to be done so manually, in such a time consuming manner?
Sure, I could just use Mandrake, but I'd rather use Gentoo. But I won't pay the elite-geek tax to use it.
No wonder Microsoft still has 90%+ market share. [frowns]
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With desktop Linux still not having dented the 1% mark, will Syllable be the one to do to Windows what Firefox has done to IE?
No it won't, because Linux has something that took it a lot of time to achieve: mindshare. At best, Syllable can be a training OS that is unencumbered by Unix's long history to develop things that haven't been done before. Then those ideas can be ported to Windows and/or Linux.
Having said all that, I hope the Syllable team can prove me wrong.
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But the best thing to do with it now is abandon it.
To make an OS useful requires a ton of device drivers. These guys have barely scratched the surface of what's needed. Even today, after thousands of man-years of effort, GNU/Linux hasn't achieved the level of driver support that Windows has.
Abandoning X has the consequence that lots of apps will not run on Syllable. Seems a giant leap backwards. Presumably, Syllable is aimed only at home users who just have one PC? Somebody who has a LAN is going to want X. I couldn't work without it.
The free-software community has barely enough resources to support one OS really well. GNU/Linux needs all the work we can put into it. Trying to promote a competitor will, if successful, divide our resources and make it much harder to establish any free operating system as a serious competitor to Windows on the desktop.
There are very specific reasons people don't use it, X-windows being one of those big reasons.
I call bullshit.
Perhaps it's cool for the Slashbots of the world to keep complaining about X. You've been doing it for years. You've been complaining about it while not noticing that X has been improving by leaps and bounds lately -- particularly now that some innovative people are back at the helm of X.Org and FreeDesktop.Org. There's virtually no performance penalty for network transparency, there's all that cool alpha compositing stuff in there now, and some very sophisticated desktops have been built on top of it. X IS NOT A PROBLEM.
In fact, by building a new operating system that doesn't have the X Window System in it, all you're doing is throwing away the existing pool of applications. The "average user" doesn't care how the window system was built; he only cares whether his applications run. And run they do, every time you boot up one of the millions of desktop Linux systems already in existence.
The only reason Linux has not yet penetrated the desktop market in double-digit percentages is because of the chicken-and-egg problems surrounding application development vs. end user take-up. It's happening, but it's happening very slowly. And it's not going to happen with a BeOS knockoff, because that reduces your application pool to almost zero.
True, Linux has a few more technology hurdles to overcome, such as automatic detection and mounting of various types of removable storage, and these problems are currently being addressed by projects like D-Bus. We're just about at the point of pulling past Microsoft in the desktop ease-of-use department. The problems are all people-related now.
If the marketshare of Windows is going to fall, it's going to fall to Linux and Mac, not to some BeOS knockoff. Stop deluding yourself.
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Its easy to look at it and pick holes (and I can see a lot of holes to pick from the comments about tar and attributes onwards) but it is still a great way to learn to program and to do stuff.
What would have happened if everyone told Linus "there's already Windows, Minix, Hurd, OMU.. why bother' ?
Alan
eh, nobody has to install Gentoo. If you're looking for a quick install, use a different distro, that's not what it's there for. If it seems pointless to you then you're not the target audience. Compare Gentoo to Linux-From-Scratch and it won't seem that crazy; it basically is a Linux-From-Scratch that automates the brainless parts (like "download this package, uncompress it, apply this patch, run configure with these options, ....)
Gentoo with an installer script would be cool too, and I imagine people are working on that. I don't think it's as easy as you think it is though; considering you're complaining about how hard it is to install it on just one computer, think about having to write an installer that considers all of each users' wacky configurations. It can be done, but I'm not terribly surprised it hasn't been done yet considering Gentoo's goal isn't to be an ease-of-use-focused distro.
I'd have to say programs don't depend on several hundred tiny libraries because there are very few apps available for this OS yet. In fact, most of your points seem like they're functions of it being a small project.
It'd be easy to make a drag-drop gui for any of the package managers you mentioned, but it's no particular gain over using a graphical package manager since a) it's not like you're buying software on a CD from a store and b) except for the largest software projects and the most popular distros, one can't actually download the distro-specific package from the software project's website - you get it from your distro anyway. If you download all the available software from one central source, why not just use a package manager?
Fast booting is good, and if the OS was capable of doing all the things Linux does I'd consider that an advantage. But seeing apps "just pop up" isn't that much of an advantage if the app is Links2 rather than Firefox.
I'd keep an open mind about it as it seems like a worthwhile project but I'd say your expectations are a little on the high side.
which is completely unimpeded by any legacy X-Windows foundations or toolkits beneath.
It is Syllable that is the "legacy design" here. The entire industry is finally moving to more dynamic languages (Java, C#, Python, VB.NET, Objective C), dynamic GUI configuration (XUL, Glade, Avalon), vector graphics (SVG, Render, DisplayPDF), and client-server GUI models (XP-GDI, DisplayPDF, X11).
While one can discuss the relative merits of those technologies, relative to any of them, an OS with a GUI based on a huge C++ GUI library is an anachronism. Except for Syllable's nifty graphics, Smalltalk-80 looks like it was more advanced and flexible technology a quarter of a century ago.
Sorry, it IS here. Just because it doesn't act like OSX doesn't mean anything. No, it's not OSX...so what?
Does everything have to behave like everything else? OSX is very elegant...so what? I enjoy KDE...I think it's very elegant. Who's right and who's wrong?
OSX is right for you. KDE is right for me. But just because OSX is a nice UI doesn't mean everything else is crap.
And more to the point, Linux is the Harley...where you can tinker with it and customize it totally to become anything you want. While OSX is more like a crotch-rocket Ninja or whatever the kids are riding now adays. Very sleek, very fast...but can't really be totally (and I mean totally) customized to where you want it.
Thanks for the analogy...you just had it mixed up. Glad I could set you straight.
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I wish that more of these small os groups would get together and create 1 independant OS from MS and Unix. They all seem to follow the same general ideas the Syllable or BeOS have... give the user lots of power, a new non-X display core and make it quick. But this all seems like a country divided. Nothing is ever going to take off with all of these small groups.
If the leaders of a few of these groups would get together and work on one project, there's a slim chance that it might get somewhere. If I were going to try to organize something, I'd be looking seriously at OpenBeOS, as it has all the API documentation nicely created for it. But hey, it's never going to happen, and MS will continue to rule the desktop, with Linux being a lowly contenter waiting in the wings, never to really get a chance.
kiwi
When a complete novice wants to install something from a CD on OSX all they do is drag the .app bundle to the hard disk,
Complete novices don't install applications on their machines at all--they use whatever comes preinstalled. That's why both Apple and PC vendors sell machines with entire software suites preinstalled.
with Linux you either have to use some vendor specific tool to manage the myriad dependencies or run rpm manually.
There is nothing to "manage": the major Linux distributions handle all the dependencies for you. That's a big advantage Linux has over both Windows and Macintosh.
Linux is a great desktop, provided you want to only use the software that you are given by the distributor
Yes, that's quite right. And unlike Macintosh, Linux vendors give their users single-stop solutions for all their software needs.
OSX, all that is quite unnecessary.
Installing and maintaing software on OS X is a lot of work: for most third party applications, you have to manually download, install, and update applications. If there are dependencies, you have to track those down manually as well.
Worse, unlike Windows, Macintosh doesn't even have a single, consistent way of installing or removing packages.
I've been using Linux for over five years now as my primary desktop. I am currently running Mandrake 9.1, which uses KDE 3 and a 2.6 kernel. If Linux is "functionally indistinguishable" from Syllable then I must have been taking some pretty scary sorts of drugs these past few years, because to me Linux still feels like a big bloated lump of an OS that tries to be a desktop OS, but bless it, you know it really wants to run Apache or Oracle instead.
No matter what I do to try and tweak my Linux desktop, something without fail will break, or just not work, or totally dispoint me. Linux just feels oh so very klunky, and after five years of it you'll have to excuse me if I'm a little tired of it.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Linux isn't hard to use, but it is extraordinarily difficult to fix and maintain.
Linux is suitable on the desktop if you don't mind having to baby sit it. I've been using it for the past five years. That doesn't mean I'll spend every spare waking moment I have available to me trying my hardest to replace it with something better.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Mac OS X has bash. I can take a screenshot of my MAC OS X desktop with a terminal window, and you would hate it just as much?
Just because on OS has a very powerfull comand line program, doesn't mean that anything *has* to be done in it, for the average user at least. I use the command terminal all the time in OS X - for running make or fink or whatever. But my G/F has never loaded the terminal on either OS X or Linux, and I doubt she even knows what one is.
Terminals are for power users, and need to stay there. An Operating System without a decent terminal program (e.g. windows) is crippled, IMO, and I can't use it without being frustrated.
I'll help this flood along.
There is nothing wrong with X-Windows that can't be fixed in an elegant way that provides a path for future flexibility, while still maintaining the key killer features of X11: network transparency (per-window) and backwards compatibility. I think it's pretty cool I can remote login into an ancient unix machine and run an old motif app on my x.org 6.8.1 linux box with translucency and shadows. Sure you can always run an X11 thunk layer on top of the window system de jour, but invariably, GUI systems end up re-implementing many things X has always had. Windows just added network transparency recently in the form of terminal services (so don't tell me no one uses it; if they didn't demand such things, MS wouldn't have put them in windows).
Perhaps if you tried something other than Mandrake...
Typical response. Blame [something] else.
"I use Mandrake and it's slow." - "Mandrake is crap. Try Debian."
"OK, now I use Debaian and it's still slow." - "That's because KDE is crap. Try Fluxbox."
"OK. now I use fluxbox and it's still slow." - "That's because ATI sucks. Buy an NVidia card."
"OK. I bought an NVidia and it's still slow." - "That's because..."