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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."
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.
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 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.
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.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
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
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.