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Why New OSes Don't Catch On
mopslik writes "OSNews has an interesting editorial discussing why smaller operating systems will have a hard time gaining popularity. Familiarity, developer participation, and market saturation are listed as reasons for failure. Although the article focuses mainly on Syllable and SkyOS, I'm sure there are countless other operating systems to which these arguments apply."
This strikes me as one of those "duh...." type editorials. I have a deadline... I have to write *something*... Maybe no one will notice if I write about something obvious.
It is a classic chicken and egg problem. Why would anyone other than a OS hobbyist (by definition a very small number) switch to an experimental OS? I would never switch a family member to a niche OS. When they ask me what I use at home, I may tell them about it, but even if they expressed interest would I not switch them over. The potential for unlimited phone calls is near 100%.
Linux has the luxury of time, broad acceptance over a large geek audience, and the benefit of being one of the first successful open source, collaborative endeavors. Anyone trying to jump start the same thing now is in for astronomical challenges.
Willie
I can't imagine anything new taking off without a suitable suite of applications for the most common applications, at the very least.
If the Sky OS is falling and no one is around to hear it, does it make a Syllable?
I bought BeOS awhile back and used it for a little while. The reason I switched back is because it just seemed like a waste of my new computer to run an OS that I couldn't really run any software on. I think new OSes might catch on if they're marketed more toward people who don't want to upgrade their computers and still have a speed boost running an OS that isn't as bloated as the mainstream ones.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Thanks obviousman!
If it doesn't support my hardware, well, I'm simply not interested.
TODO: Something witty here...
The article misses the point that Operating Systems are just tools that allow us to use programs. And programs are about being able to get useful stuff done.
People still use the Atari ST (mainly the emulator version) to do music, because there are useful applications there.
For the most part, people really don't care what OS they are using, just as long as they can accomplish whatever tasks they need to do.
I never heard of those OS's. And you ask why they never catchup
IMHO the biggest barrier is the necessary functionality in both the op.sys and applications.
New systems today have a much high bar of functionality than the operating systems of yore - Office suite, drivers, games and compatibility.
Sadly, I think the boat for new operating systems has sailed.
--
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My current one works fine, the new one requires hours upon hours of configuration and getting familiar, and even then most of the stuff I'd like to run doesn't run on it. Can't imagine why they don't take off.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
Give me a fucking break. SkyOS hasn't caught on because it's closed source and you have to pay for the beta.
Syllable hasn't caught on because they haven't appeared to have done anything of note since the AtheOS developer quit and they forked it.
People who start projects to write a new OS do so for a reason that's less than compelling for the general public. Someone writing a new OS to scratch an itch isn't any reason for me to care about it. If it's something someone's doing to learn, that means nothing to me in terms of running it. If someone's talented enough to innovate something truly novel, wouldn't it make more sense to implement that bit within one of the currently active OS projects? If the idea's got real merit, and can be plugged into the rest of a system that everyone's using (like implementing a new scheduler -- it can be done as a patch to Linux... and if it's really better, it will get noticed and maybe put into the kernel tree).
Going off and starting a new OS seems like a silly waste of resources in most cases.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Maybe not a "hard and fast" rule, but the issue of lack of developers often leads to an OS that has potential, but never matures to a stable usable state. Also, there is a big difference between general purpose OS and special purpose OS.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Alot of GUIs all look like apple or windows, give people something new to look at and they will try it just because its strange. If it works better then they will probably stick with it.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
The real question isn't "why don't they catch on?"
It's "why do they ever catch on?"
Changing your OS changes everything about your computing environment. It's like saying, "I know you like this air stuff you're breathing, but...wanna to try this nifty hyper-oxygenated liquid to breathe? It has so many advantages, and it's really cool!"
Would you make the switch?
If you want develop new OS. Embedded OS is the only way to go. We evaluate them all, ALWAYS. You will NEVER change the desktop OS.
Bill, Steve, Linus and a few thousand others have it covered. But if you wanna change the device interface, go ahead, roll it up again.
I personally choose Linux for many reasons. But if NEWOS works, and fits, and is reliable, and is FREE, I'll look at it and still probably choose Linux. If the device can't take Linux it really isn't my project at this point. But, I would hand it off to another engineer, with my recommendation of the new OS.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
Is that once new operating systems come along, in say, 10 years, the current operating systems will be so far ahead that it's impossible to catch up on.
Trying to make an OS is hard enough, trying to make it compatible for the average user is harder still, trying to do this and catch up on 25yrs of technology has got to be just about impossible.
This seems higly analogous to the situation where you have one electrical standard for interoperation of devices and power generators.
Gates struck deal that gave him a natural monopoly. There were other operating systems for the 808x family around and any one of them could have been the predominant one shipped by IBM with its PC. Any one of them would have formed a natural monopoly on that platform and made the owner rich.
Such monopoly profits are called "economic rent" which everyone with any sort of mental faculties about economics, including such staunch advocates of laissez-faire capitalism [wikipedia.org], as Milton Friedman recognize as the most appropriate source of tax revenue. Since economic rent is subsidized, rather than taxed -- due to the abandonment of the principles of Henry George -- Gates was given state support as he imposed a horrible operating system on the world and became its richest man as a consequence.
Like any welfare queen -- it corrupted his character which wasn't that good to begin with.
He can't recover his character by giving away all his wealth to fashionable causes -- he's not much of a rock star anyway. He might try getting something like a replacement of income and capital gains tax with a tax on net assets passed through the wealth-owned political system -- or at the very least a tax on market capitalization.
He might also fund a technology prize or two. Why do guys like Gates, Allen and Ellison leave it up to folks like the Ansari's to do the noble thing and stop schmoozing with people as a test of their worthiness for money? Are these guys that lonely?
Seastead this.
We'd all like to think that quality == success, but luck seems to be the real player.
Trying to dislodge entreched giants when you're the little guy is near impossible...?
Serious, you could have a product 100 times better than Windows, but it would barely see the light of day because Windows is known, trusted (even if wrongly trusted), and has excellent marketing that would squelch your product.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
It seems that the most obvious problem these niche OSes face is completely ignored by the article. There has to be a compelling reason to switch - something that an alternative OS provides that's significantly better than "mainstream" offerings.
* Windows offers broad compatibility due to its dominant market share. You buy software or hardware off the shelf and can pretty much assume it will work.
* OS X offers (currently) freedom from viruses and trojans, the availability of mainstream software tools, and access to arguably superior creative software.
* Linux offers power and configurability; plus it appeals to many people philosophically.
Yes, I read the article; but please don't hold that against me.
#DeleteChrome
... there were those who laffed at Linux...
things change...
Unless you are a special purpose OS (Embedded, Real Time, designed for certain classes of server etc.) what you really need to gain any sort of user base is applications. Very few people are interested in running an OS that doesn't have applications to do most of the the things they would like to do - and that's harder than it sounds: Yes, most people mostly just use web and email and word processing, but most people also usually have some other small niche application that they want to use as well; To get the broad userbase you need to support all those different small niche applications.
Look at it another way: What OSs have actually managed to gain some level on general support? Windows, obviously, then OS X, Linux and *BSD, and maybe you could throw in Solaris. After that you are into rather more niche material (like AIX, HP-UX, UNICOS etc.) designed for servers and the like. What do those OSs have in common? The ability to provide a wealth of appliations - though they do it by different means:
Windows - through ubiquity and market share: everyone writes apps for Windows.
OS X - by being able to promise application developers a market: Apple has always had a fairly solid hold on the graphics and design market, and enough general use that they can convince developers to write stuff for the Mac.
Linux and BSD - By being open source, and winning the open source market share. That is Linux and BSD are ubiquitous amongst open source developers - it's the Windows of the open source world.
Solaris - Well, it's more filling the niche big server market and any ability to cling to the desktop/workstation is by co-opting open source applications, which Sun have done a decent job of.
If a new OS (or some of those radical "Let's make Linux ultra standardised and easy like OS X" ideas) comes along it has to be able to attract applications: that means support open source applications for Linux and BSD with only a recompile, or be able to promise a guaranteed decent sized market of users to any potential app developers. The latter is very hard, and the former has the diffiulty of competing with the established Linux and BSDs.
Unless someone manages something truly radical I really don't expect anything but evolutionary changes in the existing OSs from here...
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Guy wrote 3 paragraphs, they weren't even long. Are you related to the guy wrote TFA?
I also detect a little pining, too.
Reading the various systems on oldcomputers.com, one realizes that it wasn't that long ago when nearly every new computer had its own OS. And each OS had its advantages and disadvantages and each one had a decent shot at becoming popular. The advocacy that sprouted up around each particular flavor du machine was always fun for a time.
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
$50 to beta test software that doesn't isn't working on my hardware is a barrier?
:)
WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT?
It seems to work for Windows!
At least Windows supports my hardware when it doesn't work.
(Slashdot Moderator Filter: ITS A JOKE, LAUGH)
"Although the article focuses mainly on Syllable and SkyOS, I'm sure there are countless other operating systems to which these arguments apply."
Like Linux?
By definition, an OS is not something that many people will change on a whim as something new/experimental comes out. The only group that will give it the time of day is the geek crowd (Slashdot crew).. nobody else has the time or the inclination to change such a fundamental part of their computer AND learn a new set of tools/make do without a known application.
/. readers usability is 0), it won't succeed/take off in a big way. The desktop PC market is not captive.. people have a choice (although most will never think they do). If a new OS wants to really shine or stand out, target embedded devices like phones, ATMs etc; or the server market. Things where geeks and Slashdotters have the bigger say.
When they say "gain popularity", what do they really expect? Do they want a 30% userbase? If so, they're dreaming. I'm going to stick my neck out and say no new OS is going to make any dent in the Windows/Mac/Linux trio at the moment. Out of all of them, Linux will, naturally, take the bigger hit as it will be the Linux users (geek crowd) that are willing to try out the new OS.
Until a new OS has the resources and usability of Windows (yes, to most
Gates was given state support as he imposed a horrible operating system on the world and became its richest man as a consequence.
How exactly was Gates given state support? If anything, the Open Source Movement is *based* on state support. After all, most open source work is done in, or with the support of public universities, and students willing to work for free because they have time and money due of their state supported education.
What you're advocating a tax on success, and anyone who can follow basic logic understands taht this does NOT work in the long run. Hell, look today at offshore companies. Companies do it because of progressive taxation. I'd be willing to bet that the US gov't would rake in a good bit more, and inspire more innovation if not for oppressive taxes. Congratulations on your fantastic, world-changing product/service! Welcome to your new 50% tax bracket!
People don't adopt new OSes because they are lazy, and learning a new OS takes work.
Seriously--my dad just bought a new iBook, after using 'doze all his life, and quit using it after just a few weeks because it was, in his words, "too much work" to learn the new system.
Moderate drunk! It's more fun that way!
Like cars; all cars use the same location for the the acelerator pedal, and the brake pedal, and the spedometer is right there looking at you.
With computer OS design, the first thing that they do is make it all different, in some way. Not just make the window border different, make the whole thing different enough that only a geek would know what to do.
With this much change how is any of it going to help any one but people who are in the business?
Allen's financial muscle didn't belong in the competition but rather behind as the funding for the prize itself. This is the same sort of garbage that goes on with NASA with taxpayer's money (which is what guys like Allen and Gates are really spending since they should have been taxed on their economic rent proceeds from nearly day one). The NASA managers (and Congressmen) just _love_ to pick winners. Its the failure mode of societies that let wealth accumulate while taxing others to pay for the protection of those property rights.
Seastead this.
Stupid!!!
I am not left-handed, either!
.. is the least reputable tech site on the internet. In the future, timothy please refrain from letting these articles through the garbage filter.
"Same thing. I've seen scores of really good restaurants fail not because of quality..."
Did you eat at them?
mopslik writes "OSNews states the obvious."
But why would I put a niche OS on PC hardware? Niche Linux distributions like MythTV, maybe, or LTSP lightweight distros designed to use old hardware as a thin client, or LiveCD OpenBSD firewall things or whatever.) Emulators for other hardware environments, maybe (one of the Psion development environments booted from PC MS-DOS mode, and I gather there are some gamer emulators that do similar things, and you used to need to run DOOM in MS-DOS instead of Windows to get native hardware access or something.)
Pen-based OS's were the last niche OS I saw that looked really interesting as a user - though they could just as well be a user interface on top of a full-featured operating system, and of course they choked and died and were replaced by PalmOS and Wince. QNX has always been somewhat interesting as hacker environment, because it's real-time, blazingly fast, and fits inside the Level 1 cache on your older CPU, though the last time I tried it it didn't have a driver for my Ethernet cards and was therefore pretty useless.
Any OS that wants me to spend time installing it had better have a lot of interesting features, or a few VERY interesting features, and it needs to run on a LiveCD (or floppy) on an older PC like a Pentium133 with 64MB RAM, because I'm not going to scrag my main machine to play with it. Neither of these includes a Reality Distortion Field, so their web pages need to actually say why they're interesting - and they don't. Syllable provides no obvious value - its web page says it's a fork off a 3-year-old PersonalEgoOS and doesn't say why it's more interesting than a well-supported OS. SkyOS looks like it has a screenshot tour and an 18MB AVI video tour, but it's too slashdotted to actually display those things, and screenshots might tell me why I want a new wallpaper or window manager but aren't the same as telling me what the OS *does* that's interesting - telling me that they'd like to offer a bounty for getting somebody to port OpenOffice just means they're running behind Linux and the BSDs - ZZZZ.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Why did I switch from IE to Firefox? Tabbed browsing, no popups, security. Firefox gave me something that I wasn't getting right then, and I didn't give up anything I was using.
Why do I use Linux for development? To have a rock solid system with fine-grained control of my development environment, and built-in, easy to use tools to automate the tedious parts of the job, like text processing.
Why do I use Windows at home? Because no acceptable substitute exists for playing World of Warcraft, etc.
Why didn't I switch my development machine from Linux to an untried OS? I don't know, you tell me, what does your OS do better than Linux that justifies me abandoning the comfort of having a million-hacker install base I can ask questions to when the box blows up and download software from when it doesn't?
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Explaining why things can't work is an excuse for their not working. Anything, Anything that does something that people need significantly better, will gain a following and can succeed on its own terms. The important thing for innovators to succeed in their innovations, is to identify the things that are truly desired and then do the hard work to do them better.
Case and point Symbian is kicking windows ce smart phones rear. I don't know many people that use windows for real time applications. ( I did once see a laser eye surgery machine driven by win98, I still have my glasses). I don't see IIS displacing apache anytime soon, despite alot more money being thrown at it. Windows also won't be achieving BSD's security levels anytime soon. I also don't see single floppy specialty windows coming out anytime soon
Syllable, Sky, They are little more than their progenitors hobbies. Theres nothing wrong with that, it can be alot of fun to write software. But to say they won't succeed because of Market saturation or developer participation is circular and disingenuous. When you say theres market saturation in an O.S. what your'e actually saying is that there are allready alot things doing what yours won't do as well. Lack of developer participation results because what your'e working on doesn't fire others imaginations or hopes.
The primary function of government that isn't provided by self-defense in a natural setting : protection of subsistence property rights (your own land from which you live, your house, your tools and your family's human capital). Without that, where would all of Gates' assets be?
Seastead this.
It would have been nice if the article actually said something about the operating systems. This reads like a 4th grade book report.
Cliff Notes version:
"There are many operating systems. Some are very popular and I can name them. Others are less popular (and legacy in some cases). And there is a whole flock of "hobbyist" operating systems that are the point of this article, but I've got no substantive information about them, such as why you might want to check into them. But I do know the names!"
This does not need an article, the answer is simple:
Lack of simple, shared application models.
If all a person needs is web-browsing, almost any os will do, but the point of a general-purpose computer is that its general purpose, and you can use it however you like. Simple app models become more specialized, and the network access anything anywhere model becomes the use linux for io or server app x, windows for gui app y, and maybe a mac for design/pub app z, cause those are the platforms specialized for each.
These are generalizations by the way, so the 50 people lining up to flame me can chill a sec. I have one of each machine running right now, and though I can do nearly everything on each of them, when it comes down to it sometimes I just need to switch over to one to get the job done. Try burning dvds the way you want (verified and with different formats) well without mac toast(or PIM stuff), or playing quickly with files on a network share without a set of linux terminals (never found a good term on a mac, and I hate winSMB, bleh), or watching funny(wmv/bad mp4) video encodes/playing games without windows.
Yes, I could probably use 1 system for all these things, but if I ever wanted to play games or prog VC++, Id need windows with a linux server, and well that just sucks, esp with 2 screens.
Its really the application holes that define OSs more than the functionality. A lack of MS Word(tm) is more likely to hold back Joe User from linux more than its incredible bounty of emacs plugins. On the other hand I gave my wife a mac mini, and never seen her so happy with a computer before.
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
From the article:
"Because it is closed-source, they will more easily be able to focus on their goals. When something needs to be done, there won't be endless mailing-list threads and forum discussions before someone actually writes down some code. When the SkyOS team decides that feature X must go in, it goes in. That is a major advantage over open development constructions because it can speed up the development process."
I don't see how being closed source automatically frees the developers from any discussion about functionality and/or bug fixes?
Inversely, just because a software is open source doesn't mean it's always bogged down in mailing lists. You better believe that there's a lot of discussion, a lot of meetings, and a lot of bickering in any large scale project - be it open source or not. Just because we can all witness the discussion on open source doesn't mean it's more prevelant.
And I see that as an advantage. With many open source projects, you as an end-user are able to join in on the discussions and voice your own opinions about things. You can change the course of a project without even being a developer.
This guy clearly just used the traditional/popular notions about software development and put it down on paper.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Go ahead and ask anyone you meet on the street about the BeOS, for example. They'll look at you like you're crazy. There are so many "alternative" OSes out there that it's impossible to keep up with them all. And none of them is robust or mature enough to be genuinely useful as a 24/7 desktop OS. Not even Linux is mature enough to satisfy a large enough market to be taken seriously.
And I say this as a MacOS X user!
As a poster has already noted, "it's the drivers, stupid."
/ever/ get docs.)
/must/ run on /something/...
Micro$oft has a monopoly because they get chipset docs years in advance of Linux, the BSDs and others (/if/ the others
http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#37
Just read about the OpenBSD people's problems.
Other OSes could come and wipe out the duopoly of Windows and Linux, but not until hardware manufacturers document their fucking hardware.
Any idea of how difficult it is to write an OS? Compound that by a million times when you can't make it run on any hardware. Ooops, an OS
When the evil hardware makers wake up and document their stuff, other OSes will become viable alternatives.
...a long time ago that his NeXT business would either be the last computer maker to succeed, or the first to fail outright*. Oddly enough, it was both. * [Wild paraphrase]
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
Both of these OS's were designed in a deep academic environment to be able to do really interesting things, and they're fundamentally different from just building Yet Another Unix-like thing with a window system on it (ok, Plan 9 did evolve from Unix, and does have an aggressively different window system, but it's not just random me-too-ism.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I agree with the article. I developed my own OS, called Vaporware, and it didn't catch on at all.
Until we have really good open-source emulators (or API translators like Wine) that work on any platform and run any program, it'll be very difficult to get anything else off the ground at this point with any kind of saturation.
There's no point in running any OS really if you have to constantly switch back to another OS to do any meaningful work. This is the biggest obstacle to adoption.
Maybe the more pertinent question is broader: what can any OS offer that I can't already get from an existing, more established product?
And, what more do people really expect? What idea are out there that could TRULY (I mean TRULY, not market_speak) revolutionize the way people use computers? And, are those ideas actually OS based? or application based? or hardware based?
I suggest that frankly, their isn't that much else out there that operating systems can't already do, or are at least well on their way to doing. Everything else is just incremental improvement and refinement. I, for one, would love to hear what are the truly innovative ideas for computers. I bet they don't belong, or fit, into an operating system unless you are going for market lock and force it into the operating system a la MS and IE (sorry, couldn't resist).
man, I feel like mold.
Obviously that should have read "property rights beyond subsistence".
Seastead this.
OS's don't catch on for the same reason new doesn't catch on. For the same reason most resturants fail and half of all marriages fail and 99% of every life form that ever was is extinct. Mostly everthing fails, collapses, dies or is left in the dust for no obvious reason.
Economists talk about natural and artificial barriers to entry in markets, that produce monopolies. An artificial barrier is usually due to govt. regulation. OS's have a natural barrier to entry since customers number 1 concern with a new OS is that it runs their existing software. So, to start a new OS, you need at minimum to get software vendors to port their software to your OS. An even better scenario is if your OS can run existing binaries. If you don't run existing software, you'll need to find a niche market who don't care about existing products for the app you're supporting
Vote for Pedro
What about the effect of Live CDs? These new OSes have something that Windows and Linux didn't have when they first began--a CD that can boot the OS and let you check it out without installing it first. This allows proponents of an OS to easy show off its capabilities.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
also want to add- I think developers writing new general-purpose OSes from scratch may be slightly misguided. With hardware speeds reaching infinity as prices approach zero, coming up with an OS that handles thread scheduling & semaphores slightly faster than Linux, OS X or Windows isn't exactly going to change the world. Almost every component underlying the OS right now is commodity & freely available--network stacks, VPNs, IO, file systems, etc. Why keep reinventing this stuff?
The real room for improvement is in the user interface. Apple is leading at the moment--they get a lot of things right, but there are still a lot of shortcomings (anyone remember the OS/2 WorkPlace Shell? Still beats the pants off Aqua, in my opinion) I'd rather see hobbyists focus on usability & interface design - there are huge unexplored opportunities there for real innovation.
PS: Sending all of his money to Africa to alleviate "poverty" there is rather ironic since most Africans actually own subsistence-level assets. Most US citizens, the folks he depends on to fight and die protecting his property rights, and to pay taxes to pay for the government that supports the social construct of property rights, don't have those subsistence guarantees anymore. What they have now, since the GI's left the farm for the cities are jobs -- jobs that Gates can't wait to give away to people from other countries.
Seastead this.
The big factor is how much a user can get done without touching a book. And as much as I use Linux, Windows is an easier beast. Macintosh is a simple machine to use, but I miss the right mouse button.
Here is the crux, if you can put a machine together that a novice can take a picture on their new digital camera, put a caption at the bottom, save it, and email it to a buddy, print it out on 3x5 photo paper, and then burn the album on a DVD, you have a winner.
By novice I mean someone who thinks that cut and paste is mind-blowing.
So it required hardware support, but try that on a linux box, your dealing with a ton of applications.. Windows has a freakload of things that are designed to make the dumb stuff easy. Once there is a machine that can do that, where my Dad isnt growling at the monitor, I'm there.
Storm
How can a hardware manufacturer use a new OS?
Example: Lots of computers, especially mobile computers, but also fixed terminals, are needed in business and industry to collect data and feed it to a central server. Large organizations have gazillions of lines of old code that works perfectly fine, and is designed to interface with something simple, like a VT100 or 5250. These legacy applications are going to be around for a long, long time.
Want to market a new OS? Start by writing terminal emulation software. This is not too difficult. Ideally, you write the OS to run efficiently on a low spec, bulletproof computer. Now you've got a market to sell thousands, or tens of thousands of inexpensive, durable computers and OS's.
Threre's a little company in Texas that makes, as in manufactures, computer in the USA. AML mobile computers run Linux, and come packaged with terminal emulation software. They are used to imitate dumb terminals so people can wirelessly collect data on the shop floor, or in a warehouse. AML also manufactures stationary terminals. These low tech devices are reasonably durable, and cost hundred less per unit than competing devices that have to pay the Windows tax.
The simple fact is that AML uses Linux because it's convenient. They could just as easily use something else, if it existed. All they need to do is port one application. The clients literally don't care what OS the devices run. So long as the device can pretend to be the appropriate flavor of dumb terminal, it's good enough. The less it costs, and the less frequently it breaks, the better.
What OS is the Blackberry running? It has 3 million users.
If someone's talented enough to innovate something truly novel, wouldn't it make more sense to implement that bit within one of the currently active OS projects? If the idea's got real merit, and can be plugged into the rest of a system that everyone's using (like implementing a new scheduler -- it can be done as a patch to Linux... and if it's really better, it will get noticed and maybe put into the kernel tree).
Speaking as someone who fixed more than a dozen critical bugs in {Free,Open,Net}BSD kernel code over the last 10 years I have come to abandon both my dreams of starting my own OS and having my changes incorporated into my favorite BSD OS. The thing is that when you start fixing bugs which were introduced by some established coder who suffers from the NIH syndrome and this person starts to disrespect and ignore you, the whole community starts following suit and your patches are soon left to collect dust in the PR database. In the end it's all about ego, politics and personal arguments, if they don't like you for some reason your patches will be left out in the cold, even if they would fix some critical problems. When you come up with something innovative and discuss it on the mailing lists they will ignore you or they will argue against your propositions. Then two weeks later you see some committer who never even participated in the discussion commit code which basically implements some of those same ideas which were mocked and rejected by the community. They don't mention you in the Copyright notice, you can't get any credit and they won't commit your code to the CVS source tree. So what do you do? Fork off and start your own BSD? Maybe if you're Matt Dillon. I can't afford the overhead associated with that kind of project and I doubt I'd get more than 2 other experienced developers to join the project. I could get my main ideas implemented within 6 to 8 months, but after that I don't really have a plan for where the project should go. I'd have to play catch-up with the BSD I would use as a basis and after a while they'd incorporate some of my code, but not in the way I would like them to and my project would be dead in less than 2 years.
I have come to hate the politics and the hypocrisy in most of the open source OS communities and I have seen so many talented people quit BSD development for similar reasons that I'm so burned out I doubt I will ever submit another patch or suggestion on how to fix something. Instead I'm just going to spend more time working on the commercial projects. They don't just put food on the table, but the people I do them for also appreciate them and give me the proper respect. Sorry about ranting, I just had to get that off my chest.
Making another kernel has no hope, it's too much to cover and too little to offer.
It's better to make a framework for applications running on top of existing kernels, with new concepts (like no-filesystems, OO, event-driven apps), and fill with apps that people may want (browsers, emails,etc) and tools that developers would like to use; and only then, will be a lot of demmand for a new stand-alone OS.
examples: jnode, unununium, even squeak and open crocket.
at least it's easier to try your system without having to reformat your disk
SkyOS looks interesting, however its creator appears to hate open source and has a very commercial-oriented agenda, which is bound to failure. Be Inc. tried that, and failed horribly, because there's no way in hell that one can compete with Microsoft. SkyOS is heading the same route.
Insightful stuff... let's make sure everybody can read it.
1) What's in it for me.
2) What does it do for me.
3) How much do I get out of it.
If any new OS can't fill in those 3 simple questions without comparing with the "other" OS, Fancy names and marketing won't save it... perhaps World Domination may...
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
It seems to me that the most promising thing to help a new OS would be porting a Java VM to it. This obviously would open up the platform to all the java software out there. But less obvious is the fact that your OS is no longer subject to the chicken and the egg problem. People will be writing java software for other platforms for a long time and it will work on your OS without so much as a recompile (in a perfect world). The true nature of java would be realized and people's underlying OS's could compete and be chosen for performance, stability, security, etc.
Yay me! ^^
Yeah, yeah, they don't call it an OS; it's a "platform", but then isn't that the same terminology we use for OSs, like "the Windows platform".
Anyway, what I'm getting at is that the low-level part of the platform is really hard to do these days. Getting to the same level of support with device drivers and so forth is an impossibly large slope (wall).
The OSs that will succeed are the ones that concentrate on the higher level. Java is an OS that can be ported to other "low level" OSs and you can run your programs on the Java OS wherever it may be.
The operating system, in the traditional sense, is a done deal. It's the virtual abstraction above it where it's at.
So, I think there are cases where that is exactly what is wanted.
Then, you have the case of a purely modular OS - think Linux but where EVERYTHING is a module. There, you have the above benefits when doing specialized work but CAN generalize the system on an as-needed basis when you want to do more.
The problem of software is a bigger concern, but Linux demonstrated via the (now neglected) IBCS system that a kernel can run binaries for other OS'. It would be simple enough to make an OS core that used an IBCS-like mechanism to run non-native binaries at near-native speed. Then, you'd have no problems on the software front, as everything would be runnable.
Indeed, this direction might be easier to digest by the software industry. An OS that could run anything could run their software WITHOUT needing extra developers or expense bar some simple testing.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
When I ask what they want it for, it is usually 'oh, you know, Word'. My reaction is usually, go get an electronic typewriter and save yourself £800..
Yeah, because there are no benefits at all to a modern word processor like Word. Stabbing your own industry in the foot?
Maybe this was meant to be funny?
..don't panic
The more Microsoft products run on it ,the more it's a real threat to them.
If they get games and business software working on it then watch out.
They need to get NTfs filesystem working so it can be used for an emergency boot disk. It's only Fat32 now.
http://www.reactos.com/
When I can talk to the thing, I probably wont care about windows and menu's and things.
There will need to be a big re-think about how things work.
Some-one wake me up when this happens, pls...
I hear when you subscribe to slashdot they just give you a link to OSNews.com...
They care about applications. Killer applications.
Windows has >90% marketshare and it costs a non-trivial amount of money to develop an application that works across the board.
Adding MacOS and Linux versions is often difficult enough to justify.
Even when a number of competing hardware platforms implement the same API, the per-hardware platform bugs/test scenarios can be cost prohibitive. Java's a good example of this.
What application is killer enough that someone can stand to rewrite/QA to support .1% marketshare platforms?
Aside from linux which could just keep on growing until it finally is big enough, the only way I can see of a new os ever competing with MS is if a giant corporation like Sony put all their money behind it.
;)
:)
Wouldn't that be interesting? MS attacks one of Sony's babies (video games, ps2) and Sony replies with striking to the heart of M$? os
I don't think the chances of it ever happening are very large.
Another way would take a long time but is kind of like apple. Start out with a very cheap computer with a new os and sell them together. (but make sure people can stick linux on it
Lastly, kind of like the sony thing, cater to gamers. If someone could come up with a minimal os that ran on computers and could run modern games faster than windoze, you'd have a chance. (good luck on that one
For linux, you've got the applications, it just needs the games. Get the games, get the gamers, get the big $$$, kick ms down.
> When I switched my main machine from Windows to SuSE/KDE, most things worked in nearly identical ways.
That's because Linux is trying really hard to mimic Windows-isms in order to "gain users shares". Not very inventive, but what's to expect from a 1970s OS anyway?
Take a look at Plan9 ( www.cs.bell-labs.com/plan9dist ), a real innovative OS that did not catch on. Its take on networking and window managers is WAY above average and really inventive. Then you might think that there's a different way, a better way, at doing things.
For a new OS to pick up though, you need intellectual curiosity from users, and courage from managers...the fact that there's not much change in the OS space is not a good sign.
Also, Rob Pike's "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant" talk seems appropriate for this topic.
Most people have basic issues when it comes to an OS (and by OS, I'm referring specifically to a desktop OS with a GUI... since that's the concept that the average user relates to):
/opt, /bin, /usr/local/bin, etc, etc.
(1) Hardware compatibility
If you write an OS for the masses but it only supports your system, you're SOL. You need a community to support you and perhaps some corporate support. Networking is key here.
(2) Ability to use full featured software
You must be prepared to either write or port multitudes of software and get them to work relatively bug-free on your system. BeOS had a slick interface and a neat concept for handling processes... too bad it didn't actually run much of anything.
(3) Document compatibility and portability
Your software better be able to handle whatever documents are thrown at it, and whatever medium you store them on needs to be able to be read by a Windows PC. Sad fact of life, but for now, that's the way things are.
(4) Ease of use
The easier, the better. It shouldn't take a rocket scientist to use the OS or the software or administer accounts on the system. The average user doesn't care and doesn't want to learn about the wonders of the CLI, and all the complaining and boasting in the world is not going to get them to change their minds. You are not a genius just because you know the arguments to get at the contents of a bzipped tar file.
Same goes for installing software. Ideally, all you should have to do is download a single file, double click it, go through any configuration details, and it's installed for you. I hear that in Mac's OSX, all you have to do is drag the file to the application folder. Works for me, and everyone knows where their software is. Better than having software in
(5) Software and UI orthogonality
This is where you get down to brass tacks, and why people tend to swoon over the Mac's GUI. In an ideal world, every bit of software on your system that has access to the GUI will seamlessly work with every other bit of software. If you can drag and drop files and place them in a folder, then shouldn't you be able to drag and drop them into an application? If CTRL-INSERT is how you copy a selection in one app, then shouldn't it be that way for all apps? And so on and so forth.
(6) Conceptual details
Zonealarm is a great piece of software, and the reason why is that it works at a level that most people can understand. Talking to somebody about port numbers is going to get a blank stare, but if you ask them whether or not they want a piece of software to access the internet, they understand. People relate to most things on a spatial level.
The good news is that most of this stuff could be done in Linux or BSD (probably through forking) if people really wanted to get it done. Changing things like directory structures to reflect basic human understanding, porting software with a common desktop and menu interface in mind, allowing metadata to be stored on a file system and using it creatively, and making the desktop a seamless experience are all possible.
Now, obviously, I'm talking about OSes in terms of a desktop system used by someone who works with a GUI every day, but if you really want to make a change, you have to give people what they want and what they need, not what you consider to be sufficient. This isn't about writing dumb software. There is a time and a place for complex applications like 3D modelers and the like, but it isn't in the average day to day home PC user's desktop. After all, if you can't write elegant software that allows people to effortlessly use their PCs to do what they desire, then maybe it isn't the user who's the dummy.
I think these efforts are great. I realize that everyone here probably already has a bias, but let's not forget about what motivates people - one source of motivation is passion.
If someone were to take an old junker (car) and rebuild it in his/her garage, tinkering a bit here, a bit there, eventually there might be something really worthy to show for it. Even if there isn't, so what? Perhaps the joy is in the process, and not necessarily the result.
Code on Syllable, SkyOS.
Cost & Usability
This goes together, and is my reason why Amiga died, Amiga's OS was pretty slick but when you got it out of the box you could do practicallty NOTHING with it, everything you WANTED to do with it cost money and was hard to locate a vendor to sell it to you, wanted to do a little word processing? You need to buy Word Perfect or Final Copy (proably get more memory too), wanted to Surf the internet? You needed to buy a TCP-IP stack and then also buy a browser! Apple realized that having included internet suport would gain it share, and MS did too soon after, but others were still in the tollbooth-OS mode. Also if you bught an iMac you got Appleworks and on sone Windows boxes like eMachines you got Works, which also made those systems "usable" out of the box.
Accessibility
This is what killed Ti 99/4A, when you lock up everything that makes a computer programmable and then also charge for an SDK will scare off your hobbiest msrket, without that you loose the grass-roots eforts to cover some of the OS weaknesses when the companies are dragging their own feet. Windows had an in with BASIC included, Apple charged for all developemnt tools early on, now it's a little better for Mac/Wint but now here's Linux which offers some really kick-butt tools right on the Distro CDs, that is a big reasone why Linux is growing so fast, the tools are there for the average Joe to make something with thier system.
Versatility
Other die becasue they just can't do everything (linux had until the past couple years suffered from due to that. partly because of lack of drivers other times because the disconnect of the OS vs. the GUI vs. the printing drivers.). If an OS has definate weakspots in either IO, sound, video, printing, memory/disk usage, etc. you will get hopefully a vertical market but probably won't replace the home PC. The reason why Windows and Mac are so popular is they can do just about everything and when a new technology comes out it is expeted they will be able to do that too.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
It seems to me that the increased availability of Open Source applications decreases the entry barrier for new operating systems somewhat. In order to be a usable alternative, proponents of a new operating system 'just' have to port a subset of existing Open Source application--not trivial, but much easier than convincing commercial developers to invest in an unproven operating system. I'm not saying that a new OS is likely to take off to the extent of replacing Windows or Linux, but Open Source applications can give them a kind of viability.
Let's say, you get a community of hobbyists together, put together a reasonably stable operating system with some arguable advantages over the big three--call it 'NewOS'. Now some of the hobbyists port an Open Source browser, an Open Source word processor, and a couple of dozen other applications. Additional hobbyists play with NewOS, like it and set up their computers to dual-boot with NewOS and one of the big three or four OS's. People develop original software for the new OS because it's a small pond where their stuff gets noticed rather than lost in the sea of software available in the bigger ponds or Windows ocean, or port second tier stuff from the bigger operating systems for the same reason.
'NewOS' gets a pretty good set of applications--nothing like Windows or Linux, but not non-existant and a nice little community of hobbyists who can be big fish in their little pond rather than minnows in one of the larger ones. Some of the bigger fish in this little pond will probably eventually migrate to larger OS's but as long as new developers come in the community remains viable.
'NewOS' doesn't have to become the new Windows or the new Linux. It just has to keep a hobbyist community happy and large enough to keep porting new applications.
A lot of what is being said about this pair of niche OS's is reminiscent of what was said about Linux back when it was new. A lot of new things get tried, but very very manage to put together that magic combination of meeting a real need with sustained, competent execution.
That means that, as silly as some of you will think, the next big phenomenon comparable to Mosaic or Linux is just getting off the ground now. The few people becoming aware of it now are saying things like "hell, no driver support or PPP? COME ON!"
I'm not saying it's either Syllable or SkyOS but it will certainly be something. And here's the big need that everyone has:
A COMPETENT, FREE DESKTOP O/S.
Windows sucks, OS X is expensive, and Linux is failing on the desktop for a number of reasons, both good and bad. The next big thing will meet this need.
For every one million failed operating system there will be one great success. The attitude of you guys is somewhat disgraceful to the innovation that has brought the industry to where it is today. If smalltalk and dynix were never developed would the macintosh and windows ever had exisisted? If people never saw past machine language would we able to write the complex applications that scale to thousands of proccessors today? If at&t would have thought that vax was good enough and ran its apps plenty fine would the *nix derrivatives be in existance today. It may seem futile to develop an os but i applaud those that do so, and so should you! Because without the garage coders and the corporate failures we would still be pluggin vaccum tubes to multiply and divide. The attitude you have today is what is plauging the stagnent software industry. Innovate or die I say, because if you don't some kid in the basement will. Or big corporate X will own the market next. /end rant
Later,
Phil
...is that 20 years from now everyone will probably still be using either Windows or Linux/UNIX. Although Linux is debatably better than Windows, it still sucks. As does every OS out there. They are all too hard to use, crash a lot, and are overly complicated. We've been at a complete standstill in OS development since the 80's. Why doesn't anyone here come out with something new instead of trying to push Linux on people that don't want it. The reason people haven't switched to Linux is that both Linux and Windows suck.
There was a JOS project a while back, which is dead I think. (I started a leJOS project myself about 5 years ago, which is still quite actively used, but that's a slightly different thing.) There's another project I saw just today... JNode.
XML UI Browser/Platform
I know it is a chicken-and-egg situation on whether users or developers lead. The Mac when it came out had a lot going for users -- there was nothing like it at the time for doing stuff with text and graphics in documents -- it started the whole desktop publishing area. But it was an incredible bear to develop for. Starting out, you had to get a Lisa or something and cross compile and cross develop, and this business of windows and resources and event loops was all a great mystery at the time.
Microsoft was always easier to develop for -- in the DOS days all of the "hooks" were documented and in the early Windows days, Microsoft was famous for peddling the SDK cheap. OS/2 shot itself in the foot by adopting a game console maker's approach to selling development software.
But if Microsoft was not your cup of tea, there was always the Borland alternative on Microsoft OS's, which practically invented the IDE. Between Microsoft Visual Basic and Borland Delphi, you had two powerful tools for taming the beast of the GUI application.
One strength of OS-X they tell me is xcode and Cocoa. I am told this system takes the next step beyond the events-properties-functions model of widgets and VB-style drag-and-drop layout. You would think this would attract developers just for the cool factor which would lead to apps, more users, and so on. But for most programmers, Objective C is sufficiently oddball -- it is if under Windows, the only thing available was Delphi Pascal and people were thinking "that Delphi thing is great, but who want's to learn Pascal just to use it?"
I guess Windows has the apps, OS X has the coolness factor, BeOS had the multimedia responsiveness (which may have come at a price of developers having to write multi-threaded C++ code). Is xcode/Cocoa that big of a breakthrough that I should get a Mac and start hacking on that?
yes, who needs a new os? maybe companies, to gain share market, etc. user's definitely don't. what we, users, need is reliable, easy to use, cross-platform, cheaper software (applications).
Over the years there have been many great OSes that now see little use. NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP, BeOS, and Plan 9 are very nice operating systems. *STEP is the direct ancestor of Mac OS X and brought a lot of new, innovative features to operating systems, such as Display Postscript (predecessor of Quartz), Interface Builder (predecessor of XCode), the dock, etc., not to mention boatloads of innovative software packages (such as Mathematica, Lotus Improv, and the entire Lighthouse Design software collection) and it showed the world how Unix for the masses should be built (which KDE and GNOME still have lots of catching up to do). BeOS has a nice infrastructure (compared to other OSes of the time like Mac OS 8/9 and Windows 9x), and is easy to use. Plan 9 is a different beast altogether compared to the other OSes that I mentioned; Plan 9 takes Unix's idea of "everything is a file" to another level; for example, the window manager supports pipes and filters just like any other traditional command line program. And all of the operating systems can run on any old 486 or Pentium.
What happened to all of these OSes? NeXT was bought by Apple (and didn't release a version of Mac OS X for commodity x86 machines, for obvious business reasons), BeOS's parent company was going through business issues and ended up being discontinued, and Plan 9 is virtually unheard of unless you're an operating systems researcher. All three failed to make a big splash for various reasons. NeXT had the software, a supportive development group and development infrastructure (especially from Lighthouse Design and the Omni Group) and (for the first few years) had the hardware, but the x86+Windows juggernauts and the steep pricing were issues too huge to overcome for a lot of people, which ultimately led to NeXT's near demise (until NeXT bought Apple for -$400 million). BeOS had a nice infrastructure, but it didn't catch on because of Windows's mass acceptance in the marketplace, lack of huge productivity applications (which is caused by a lack of interested developers), and corporate drama. Plan 9 isn't replacing *nix because most of us "geeks" are very content with our beloved Unix (no matter how flawed it is sometimes) and see no need to change, and Plan 9 doesn't have all of the applications that users need (like productivity suites, for starters).
Whether or not an operating system succeeds or not depends on user's acceptance and developer's acceptance. User's won't dump Windows/Mac OS for another OS until it is easy to use, has all of the applications that they need, comes at a reasonable price, and is compatible with whatever they used to use. Developers won't develop for a new operating system until development is relatively painless, comes at a reasonable price, doesn't require having to learn obscure programming languages and environments, and the developers feel like making their applications run on a new operating system would be beneficial to themselves.
That's what happening to SkyOS and Syllable right now. Users from Windows/Mac/*nix see no compelling reason to switch (ranging from ease of use, hackability, and avaliable applications), and developers have no compelling reason to develop applications that will attract a lot of people to the platform (such as a productivity suite). An operating system that expects to be widely used cannot go far without important applications such as productivity applications. And an operating system without a huge amount of developers developing applications for it shouldn't expect to be going anywhere.
That depends what use you want. There may be room for a specialty OS for dedicated devices. You might consider Opie a specialty OS, though it's derived from KDE and uses a Linux kernel. FreeDOS or one of these other GPL'd could make a nice camera, cellphone, media device or any combination of dedicated device. Not everything needs Open Office and an email client to be useful.
The killer app is GCC. Once you have that, as does Syllable, you can port anything and everything. That makes building things like cameras easy.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
What is this, "I just discovered there are alternative operating systems" day?
Why not at least mention the one alternative OS that may even have a slight glimmer of hope. I speak of Haiku (aka OpenBeOS). At least it's based on something that at one point stood a chance in the OS world.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
IIRC, all computers at the time were basically like that - even Windows 3.11 computers. At best, you had a simple text editor and the other minimalistic software - everything else had to be purchased.
Actually, that was DOS. While W95 had a copy of basic on the CD, it is ineffective because of interpreter bugs (e.g. "ON ERROR RESUME NEXT" did not function wehn it should) and editor bugs (which gave an illusion of a line of code disappearing from your program.)
IF you needed to do anything serious, you needed to buy a C compiler. Even then, you still needed a hardware information since you required many low-level activities to do anything useful.
How exactly was Gates given state support?
If the government ceased to exist, copyright also wouldn't exist. The state has facilitated to Microsoft, via copyright, a monopoly over the information that MSFT creates. Bill wouldn't be nearly as rich if copyright didn't exist.
-metric
I don't get it.
Perhaps a better analogy would be of building a car from scratch, occasionally (in the case of Syllable) using parts from existing cars, such as Linux cars.
Not disputing your point, just modifying the analogy...
Wouldn't it either have to be real slow writing everything every step of the way to disk, or basically need special hardware?
Plus, for $120 or so, I can have a UPS for any OS I want on a standard home PC, and get about the same thing.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
...only ever crapped all over itself.
I would think that the best way to get an Alt OS to catch on would be to bundle it with hardware, and to only allow approved hardware (re: the company's own or a few select third party hardware providers).
Worked pretty well for Apple back in the day... however, there will always be people that complain, "this OS does not have support for this device or that device." Heck, this still happens now with OS X and Linux and they are major players.
So, in other words, make a new device that is revolutionary (a "usable" instant-on travel computer for instance with LOTS of storage -- Palm and CE just don't get the storage part yet, but I digress), bundle your own OS, and own hardware.
As long as the device and OS are good, fans and adopters will come.
Bad Example: Psion's EPOC devices: great little devices with little hardware options that ran for days on standard AA batteries, but unfortunately they had a lousy OS. Getting Close Example: the new 20gb Linux PMA devices from Archos, but they do not have a typable keyboard integrated and are just too expensive for the the masses.
It has to be a mix of good device and good OS, otherwise it won't work (oh, and price).
(void) signal(SIGALRM, (alarm_fired=1)); if (alarm_fired) printf("Revoke is clueless!\n");
Rredundant stuff... let's send it to hell.
Back in the day when most operating systems were locked into the hardware computer manufacters had to address this issue.
There were two schools in this problem:
1. Liccens all the good software.
2. Make everything in house.
Commodore and IBM liccensed software.
To do this you contact the software develuper and get an agreement from them.
You pay to port the software over to your platform.
You pacage, ship and sell the software yourself.
You send 75% to 95% of the proffits back to the the develupers.
If your hardware catches on the original software develuper will publish the software themselfs.
This way they get more sales while adding no additional risk.
Today you'll need to offer to support the software yourself. Companys are avoding Linux purely due to support issues. Well publishers are software develupers are releasing unsupported binarys on the side.
Inhouse develupment isn't enough.
You should however start with a little inhouse develupment.
Geoworks was very populare with it's bundled applications. GeoWrite, GeoDraw etc.
That got peoples attention but with nothing to hold peoples attention Geoworks died.
Liccens software to hold them all, In house to find them, Marketting to bring them all.
And with closed file formats bind them.
What ring?
In any case.
To pull this on Linux *Ohhhh* becouse this is Slashdot and it must all come back to Linux.
Basicly set up a software publishing company that aims at Linux.
Get exclusive Linux agreements so only you can make the Linux version of the liccensed application.
Loki could do it.
So could RedHat or OSTG.
Apple could do it for MacOs X.
IBM could do it for it's own hardware. They did before.
Palm Source could do it for the PalmOs platform. The real WinCE popularity is all the Windows desktop apps on a PDA. The PalmOs file readers aren't enough. However Palm Os 5 IS powerful enough to it.
And I see AoL only versions of populare online games. Get a Discount on your favoret games from AoL.
Sigh... What can be used for good can be used for evil.
I don't actually exist.
I think it's pretty obvious.
Once upon a time there was only DOS. There was PC-DOS and MS-DOS and DR-DOS and probably a bunch of others I've never heard of. Microsoft used every way they could to shut out the competition. Some tactics were perfectly legal and ethical. Some were not.
Then there was Windows. There wasn't much competition until OS/2 came about... and that was with Microsoft's help... at first... This marked the first and only time that people could choose their OS and sill have their software work. Some people selected OS/2. Some stayed with Microsoft. Choice is good, but Microsoft disagrees. They did everything in their power, legally and ethically, and not, to shut out OS/2. It didn't matter how much better OS/2 was. Microsoft abused the Monopoly power it acquired in the DOS days to continue to leverage against consumer choice. It worked. OS/2 is effectively dead.
Microsoft is the only OS of most PCs because of agreements with OEMs to sell only Microsoft with their computers. And because of that, developers make their software only for PC/Windows (unless market demand sways them as in the case of Adobe graphics products). There was a time when people had an OS choice, but it was short-lived.
Now as Linux and other *NIXes are getting opportunities bit by bit, we may again see a day when you can choose your OS just as you choose your software. Linux is essentially Linux and runs Linux software. (yeah, there are those compatibility libs and stuff but what the hell right?)
But for the moment, developers write for WinTel platforms and so consumers don't effectively have a choice in OS if they want to run particular software... if only Adobe would make a Linux version of their suite -- I think we'd see a lot of professionals who have no need to play any games moving to Linux to do their work just as many remain on Mac today for that very reason. And why not? For the moment malware is all but written for WinTel.
Why re-invent the wheel when its so easy to just use the off-the-shelf solution?
When you don't want everyone to know how it works, you just wanna sell it: Windows.
When you are trying to make something and wanna make it so that others can modify it to fit whatever they wanna make with it: Open-Source.
And that just about covers the gamut.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
If we didnt have alternatives, then there would be no competition to worry about for the mainstream OS.
Even if people dont make the switch to "insert-your-favorite-os-here" - it often raises the standard and inject new and fresh thinking that increase the developement speed
I use Windows, Mac OS X and Linux....mostly Linux daily. And the reason for this is because it gives me some alternatives that I actually can use practically. Ok - Granted...I am not your average Joe, but I sometimes have special needs such as easy compilation of my favourite opensource software...bleeding edge versions to stay ahead of the competition, and yes - the choices gives me these things.
I would still recommend the mainstream OS to the average public even if I use Linux daily - simply because it is the easiest thing for them to get support on.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
... in my opinion is the biggest reasons alternative OS's cannot compete. Not only that writing and maintaining an OS is a full time job especially with the advance of hardware based on outdated architectures kludged together for backwards compatability because a crappy hardware architecture took off and became popular enough to go mainstream.
Next any competing OS would have to share copyrighted code with windows just to get anywhere and not run already existing applications slower then the originals. Performance and bugs are a big issue, you dont want to break stuff that already exists until you're sure its put out to pasture.
Plus without games support you can forget about your OS becoming mass market, this is why linux will always remain niche without things that make developers lives easier, what Linux and all OS's really need are standards for software and standards for hardware emulation that dont break compatability and suffer severe reductions in speed when missing hardware feature or function older software needs to function and to be emulated with decent speed.
Well, maybe. But to complete a project you need someone who can make a decision and make it stick.
I was interested in this OS since the Atheos era. Problem is that support for some devices is still incomplete or non functional. I wasn't able to test the latest live CD on two fairly common PCs: the first boots to an unsupported video mode for the attached native 1024x768 LCD and the second won't let me login as the USB keyboard seems not working yet. Maybe it will catch more attention in the future, but not before it will boot correctly on normal PCs.
Why does a new OS have to be alien? You could fork one of the old managable linux kernels - optimize it for using GPUs, etc and still run GNU stuff ... use wine (well is it GLP?) and make a MS replacement like the old NDOS stuff but cool.
Think inside the box for once.
hurd hurd hurd hurd!
Yea yea. Anyway, you USians sure suck. If you're a yank, then please DIRL (polite request on behalf of the civilized world).
Changing OSs ... is like a blood transfusion, except
your new blood is not quite compatible with your old
blood. A lot of people find it quite impossible to
migrate from windows because they've got (a) apps,
(b) data, or (c) skills which won't transfer to linux.
Basically they're locked in.
I first heard about Tandem from a friend. He saw them at a computer show in London. During the computer show, there was another show, the Ideal Home Exhibition, going on elsewhere in the same building. I guess there wasn't a whole lot of effective power conditioning going on in the building, because every time the sales droids in the Ideal Home expo cranked up washing machines, dishwashers and other power equipment, every computer at the computer show would crash. The sole exception being the Tandem booth - it just kept on trucking while everyone else was rebooting...
So how do otherwise rational slashdotters cognitively dissonate the actual fact of "market saturation" in PC operating systems with the "finding of fact" that "there is only on PC operating system"?
I'd give Syllable a better shot than Haiku. SkyOS will never go anywhere, though.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
...in 1957 or thereabouts when I was a high school student (yes, I am retired now.) A GM spokesman on career day (I believe he came down from Detroit) flatly stated there will never be more than three viable motorcar manufacturers worldwide because "there isn't enough capital" to build a company to compete with them, Ford and Chrysler. Of the three, GM had more than fifty per cent market share.
This was in precisely the same year that Soichiro Honda, who only recently had started a company that mated washing machine motors to bicycle frames, showed his first car at the Tokyo motor show, its chain drive revealing its origins.
Talk about hubris!
Based on this, I would rather predict dozens if not hundreds of dominant OSes in the next hundred years or less.
If you measure MacOS's success by market share, it's a disaster -- until very recently, it consistently lost ground to MS-DOS and Windows. Apple only makes a living because the total market has gotten so much bigger. MacOS has survived by holding on to a tiny part of its early lead -- not by penetrating the Microsoft monoculture.
"Familiarity, developer participation, and market saturation are listed as reasons for failure."
Somebody is making this entirely too complicated. Ask yourself this simple question: If an alternate browser like firefox is gaining exponential popularity, how come alternate open source OSs can't compete? We're talking the same concept. Infact, some of the key players are virtually the same-- Microsoft with their wads of cash and entrenched usability versus "that other guy".
Not to beat my own chest, but the answer is obvious and rhetorical to me. It's plain as day what one is doing that the other isn't and it really doesn't need an indepth analysis treatment to see what is amiss.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
I m using more and more java and java application.
What I only need is:
With that I can do a lot of stuff usefull like coding java application, webapps running in tomcat, go to slashdot and other documentation site,writing and opening document,...
If you have an OS you can install easily and that all the above work well you can do a lot of usefull stuff allready. Put for me you need that otherwise the OS is not usefull
"Use cases are fairy tales..." I. S. 2005
"I'd be open to switching my OS if a new OS did everything that my existing OS did *and* added a bunch of new stuff that made the effort worthwhile."
I've took the liberty of adding the emphasis there.
I think that's the crux of the problem, but also the most mis-understood part. That's the part that OS zealots love to mis-understand.
Let me delve into the semantics a bit, just for the sake of making a point. I'm not picking on your phrasing or anything, I'm just explaining _why_ new OSes fail, and why even Linux is of zero interest to Joe Average.
I don't think you mean literally "if the _OS_ did the same things". The OS taken by itself does actually very little, and is arguably the least important thing on a computer. The OS just loads and runs the applications, and provides some standard libraries and widgets. No more.
It's _easy_ for an OS to provide basically the same functionality of the OS itself, or close enough. Writing a loader, scheduler and some widgets is _easy_, and indeed half the games out there basically come with their own implementation of all three. Anyway, very single alternative OS so far had no problems doing the same things that Windows does. Yet they failed. Because that's not really what matters. You can do only so much with _only_ the OS.
I think what you really meant is "if I could get the same functionality out of my computer", which actually means the applications. E.g., you don't edit your digital photos with the OS core, and not even with MS Paint (that's an app, though), you use some program like PaintShop Pro, Photoshop or, if you're a masochistic cheapskate (yeah, I am one too) with the Gimp.
That's really what you need to do everything you could do with your old OS: an equivalent of the applications too.
That's the real entry barrier in the OS market. Writing a loader, a scheduler, a GUI and exporting some of that as libraries, is the easy part. But that doesn't even come close to letting you get the same use out of your computer. Also providing an equivalent to all the thousands of applications and games that exist for Windows, that's the hard part. That's where they fail.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"Although the article focuses mainly on Syllable and SkyOS, I'm sure there are countless other operating systems to which these arguments apply."
:D
Yeah, like Linux (hehehe)
to become famous if its development does not come to stagnancy.
From ReactOS Frontpage:
ReactOS is an Open Source effort to develop a quality operating system that is compatible with Microsoft Windows(R) applications and drivers.
~Aha~
All Haiku is doing is cloning a 6 year old (7 or 8 by the time they're finished) OS that didn't have many applications to run on it in the first place. To top it off, they're in direct competition with YellowTab, a commercial company selling an identical product with a much better pedigree. Syllable has a better chance than Haiku.
Darn! and I was just going to give a pedantic comment on that!
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
...slashdot had it covered.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
It will take some time, but in small steps it is coming along.
The most important thing for the next 10 years is the adoption of the OASIS-format, which offers these advantages over .doc:
Let's not forget that Microsoft cannot bundle MSOffice with Windows because almost half of their revenue is generated by it and doing so would put them deeply into the red. They also can't lower the price too much for the same reasons.
So, yes it will take quite long (I'd say about 10 years) but OASIS will become the standard.
Removing the Windows desktop domination will be the next step.
However, all is not lost for SkyOS. While the fact that it is closed-source is a disadvantage at one side, it is also an advantage on the other side. Because it is closed-source, they will more easily be able to focus on their goals. When something needs to be done, there won't be endless mailing-list threads and forum discussions before someone actually writes down some code. When the SkyOS team decides that feature X must go in, it goes in. That is a major advantage over open development constructions because it can speed up the development process.
The authors are confused. Being a closed-source project does not automatically mean having faster development process. However, having a team of full-time developers and sound financial base certainly will. But there's nothing to prevent an open-source application from being developed that way. There is also nothing in the open source principle which makes "endless mailing-list threads and forum discussions" inevitable. It's all a matter of organization.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
they don't catch on because they suck ;-)
Stop whining!
Another reason is that OEMs didn't distribute BeOS in any meaningful way. First, MS' OEM contracts blocked vendors from providing non-MS OSes pre-installed on new hardware. Be took MS to court and won, getting that shot down. However, it was only a pyrrhic victory. When the OEMs finally did start distributing BeOS, they did so as dual boot, but without BeOS showing up in the bootloader.
MS has obviously been aware of the bootloader since then. Pretty much any upgrade to the MS OS on machines with multiple OSes munges the bootloader so that only the MS OS shows up.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
We have a monopoly on the desktop, that monopoly will still be going strong when most of us are dead. Changing the OS is the equivalent of building a new train locomotive, and then stating it is great, just the minor issue of running on non standard track...
No OS will make a dent on the desktop. Even much vaunted OSX would be stillborn if launched openly against windows as many (most?) people here playing armchair CEO think Steve Jobs should do by allowing it to run on generic HW.
The windows platform has multi-year history of applications and importantly devolopers, that serve to keep us all locked in.
The only people even remotely capable of switching are the same people with the skills to keep windows safe from it's achilles heel (virii and malware). I have installed Linux twice and it never achieved full functionality and even if it did, I would still be reliant on dual booting windows. So I came to a conclusion: Why waste my time and disk space configuring two OS's. Now I stick to the one I need. Windows, because I am tied to the monopoly.
Switching is damn hard. But what if it was easy?
Well look at Firefox: Massive word of mouth, massive virus problems in IE, Ad compaigns, Massive feature advantage,Free, easy to switch easy to simultaneously support both. 99% legacy compatible ( few IE only pages).
So why isn't everyone using Firefox??? People consider it a coup for firefox to get 10% market share and that is just an App. A free app that is superior in just about every way.
If nothing more than inertia, niche players will stay were they are and even regress.
MVS, DOS (the original) for the IBM 360-370 series
OS/3 for the Univac 90/30
OS/4 for the Univac 9400
OS/7 for the Univac 9700
VMOS, VS/9 for the RCA Spectra, Univac 90/60
Exec 8 for the Univac 1108
CADE for the Univac 1900
MPE for the HP 3000
IBM AS/400
NCOS for the Univac 9200
CPE for the SDS/Xerox Sigma
Xerox 9700 running a modified DEC RSTS
Hmmm... Could it be that some companies wither from supporting too many OS? Naahhh... just a coincidence.
Slashdot entertains. Windows pays the mortgage.
Coyotos does away with Persistence, though, which is what gives the "restart where I left off" capabilities. BTW, there's a paper on the design of EROS's storage mechanism here (sorry, PDF).
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
You are not the average user. By posting on slashdot you've already demonstrated that.
/. stopped giving grandma and mom, dad, Sister Suzi and Brother Billy support on their Windows PC, the whole fscking house of cards would finally come crashing down.
No, the average user will ask me at least two dozen times how to create a shortcut, where his my documents files are, how to get a file from one PC to another when a drive isn't mapped and a pretty little icon doesn't exist that says "Dick's PC" on the desktop.
Print to printer on another machine, requiring a network connection? Good god? DHCP is the only thing keeping me sane. Plug in cable/DSL router, plug in computer, drive. Holy shit, if I actually had to spend more than 3 minutes setting up the average cable/dsl connection, I'd have offed myself years ago.
The average user is an id10t. Even on windows. It's only the fact that there's a HUGE network of people out there who make their life's work support this piece of shit that it keeps propagating itself. If everyone on
But no, because we're all a bunch of spineless hypocritical simpletons, we help them, and so wallow in our own Misery. BillG is laughing at us right now... And Ballmer is licking his feet...
Troll on.
Twenty years ago, there were a fair number of different operating systems, often made for different hardware, and what little software there was to choose from was expensive. Then one operating system rose to prominence and the rest is history. Could it have been any different? Possibly. For instance, if all operating systems had been closely related UNIX clones in the first place, it wouldn't have been so difficult to recompile the applications. Or, if someone had developed a common Java-like applications interface for all of the (major) operating systems, it wouldn't have mattered as much which operating system you selected.
In my view, however, it's very unlikely that any such scenario was ever going to happen; the makers of the various operating systems were always too competitive to allow those kinds of things to happen. Sooner or later, one of them was always going to come out on top, and probably more because of marketing and deal-making than the quality of their product. Microsoft's acceptance grew quickly at first as prices dropped and the choice of applications grew. But, now that they've achieved their monopoly position, there's also no reason for them to make any significant improvements to the quality of their product. Now they only thing Microsoft are really interested in, is consolidating and expanding their monopoly.
Actually, in a truly free-market economy, this is a natural progression. However, since the end result is always better for the monopolist than it is for the consumers, we have to rely on our representatives, the government, to intervene in these cases and level the playing field. It worked with Standard Oil and Bell Telephone, but not with IBM and Microsoft. Eventually, things will change, but it looks to me like mainstream software is going to suck for a long time to come.
A niche OS can sell itself if it has a killer app or feature. BeOS had a good run positioning itself as the "multimedia OS". The music publishing software Sibelius not only sold the OS (Risc OS) but the entire computer that went with it (Acorn Archimedes). Linux expanded as a niche OS on its reputation of "rock solid". Within Linux, various distros have their own selling features. Gentoo with its 'portage' package management. LFS for its educational value.
Linux had astronomical challenges when it started. It was helped by Richard Stallman, who's open source tools gave Linux an instant set of software and turned it into a practical tool. Since then the amount of OS has multiplied and starting a new OS has never been EASIER. Support GTK for instance and you already have a vast range of desktop software.
So I agree with your first point, a lof of the smaller OSs are for programmers to scratch their itch and not for your grandma. However I think the field is still more open than you suggest and we can't predict what innovation someone will come up with next. People just have to be patient and realise that when someone hypes a niche OS as the 'next thing', it may not be usable for a couple more years.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
The writer didn't put his thinking cap on. People use new OSes all the time. Think about all the gadgets techies (and even non-techies) buy every couple years and how many different OSes are involved:
Chances are these are using OSes (sometimes very new) that people didn't use before the purchase. So what? The article seemed to focus on the desktop which is fine but that is only one OS out of dozens that people use every day. The desktop is arguably the most complex in terms of user interaction which leads it to be the something that people probably do not wish to keep remastering. I'm comfortable using several different desktop OSes and I still don't like to change my day-to-day computing environment. While the core of the issue from a user perspective may be a technical one at the convenience level the real issue is probably a marketing one. Plus, the licensing agreements between companies like Microsoft and Dell make it very difficult for another to get a foothold in the marketplace.
The end result should be that you don't know what OS in your desktop the same way that most people don't know what OS in their mobile phone, PDA, or mp3 player. It should be transparent and a non-issue for users. It should just work -- no matter what it is.
Speak truth to power.
A new OS may not be needed to explore new OS ideas from a users point of view.
Take a look at NeXTStep, OSX, and Even Linux.
From the end users point of view the OS is the GUI/Desktop. You can add just about any GUI/Desktop to Unix. KDE, NextStep, OS/X, Gnome all run on a Unix base.
From the programmers point of view the OS is the API , libraries, and IDE that run on it. QT, Carbon, OpenStep, GTK, and even WineLib run on top of Unix/Linux. Frankly Unix has become a microkernel in a way. It is what you run the other stuff on top of. Unix has had every new feature shoved into it that computer science has thought of. I mean you can have Realtime Linux, Cluster Linux, uCLinux, and Pocket Linux. Of course NetBSD is what you run you toaster on.
I would love to see some new OS ideas Hurd doesn't really thrill me. Plan9 is interesting. BeOS was interesting as well. I do not see a NEW os finding much favor unless it can do something that can not be added to Unix.
I will take note with one thing in the story. AmigaOS was a successful OS. There where a LOT of Amigas sold. It remained in production for what 10 years? Just because it did not take 95% of the market does not make it a failure.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The rule has also been to buy the application that solve your problem, whether business adminstration or latest-greatest game, then the OS that can run it, and the hardware that can run that. If you go in the other order you risk ending up with an expensive useless toy.
Anyone else find it ironic that OSes like SkyOS depend on OSS software, in fact most screenshots are showing OSS software in use, yet the developer refuses to share his code for the OS with the world?
Regards,
Steve
To some typesetters, Quark on a "Classic" Mac is a Fine Instrument (TM).
It's all about where the fingers land, what function each landing position has, and how easy it is to move around among those positions.
WYSIWYG-IWYG
Quark is the vi/emacs of Page Layout.
Each key combination has a power unto itself.
There are many operating systems out there that are not running a desktop computers. Doesn't make 'em less of an operating system. Saying that SkyOS and Syllable can't compete with Windows and OSX is like saying Ferrari and Maserati will never compete with Toyota & Chevy's market share! Apples & Oranges.
Even little 'ole DOS is still a great operating system. What was once used as a desktop system and had become outgrown is still a very useful OS and lives in places you'd be surprised.
People don't realize that it takes years if not decades of money and development to create a full featured "desktop operating system" usable by 90% of the world's computer users. Looking back we can all see how long it took Microsoft to go from a crash hound like Windows 3.0 to a polished Windows XP. Just about 11 years now. A small lifetime in computing, and thats with a multi-billion dollar company behind it. Money talks!
The moral is, not all good operating systems need to compete with Windows and the "one size fit's all" desktop paradigm. Who knows how long our known concept of a desktop will even be around for. Perhaps, sooner than you think, we'll all be using different OS's for different softwares in the future and the idea of a small, less featured (less hackable), OS will be an advantage.
Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Spoon boy: There is no spoon.
Neo: There is no spoon?
Spoon boy: Then you'll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.
-----
You can't get people to do what you want without bending yourself. Don't rant, in the end you got what you wanted the most: you didn't bend.
Linux has aborted the adoption of non-Windows, non-Linux, non-BSD operating systems.
The current linux work should be reallocated into these projects:
a. Linux kernel maintenace
b. API translation/emulation layers for
a. Posix, bsd, system V
b. Win32
c. Existing Linux API
c. Linux kernel replacement
d. Hardware abstraction layer
d1. Multi CPU
d2. Multi disk, SAN, raid, etc
e. Device driver abstraction layer
The project goals:
1. Reallocate the exsiting linux development resources to produce within 5 years a second generation linux OS
2. Move hardware specific issues into the hardware abstraction layer and device driver layer
3. Provide full support to non Linux system calls - Win32
4. Allow multiple OS to run concurrently (a Win32 process, Linux processes, VMS processes, etc)
5. Shrink the size of the kernel by moving the OS API calls to OS API emulation, translation, thunk layer
6. Provide maximum compatability so that you can run binaries from different OS, differnt versions of an OS, etc,
I used to work with Tandem Non-Stop systems. Everything was mirrored. Disk controllers, disk paths, power, CPU, everything, processes. Zero downtime. But very expensive.
No, it is fast because it does a full-system checkpoint every 5 minutes. But because the checkpoint is implemented with copy-on-write can take advantage of disk-arm scheduling, and uses a low-priority migration task, it is apparently very high performance in practice. Also, processes don't need to distinguish between memory and disk. The entire disk is treated as virtual memory, and your program never needs to write any code to save to a file. Its objects are automatically persisted by the OS via the checkpointing.
But isn't this just glorified autosave ever 5 minutes? So worst case senario, you could lose everything up to 4min 59sec ago? So then the gp claim is wrong...?
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
Amen to that. Where I used to work, I heard one woman complaining about popup windows. I told her to try Firefox because it blocked popups. She said that sounded great, so we downloaded it and installed it for her.
A couple of days later, I noticed she was using IE. I asked her why she wasn't using Firefox, and her answer was "I don't know. I am used to IE".
I was amazed. She was a somewhat technical person, much more savvy than the average user. Now compare the differences between changing browsers and changing OSes.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
As long as we're dreaming up OS wishlists, I'd like to be able to run the Hurd and an OS which incorporates ideas from the Synthesis project.
Some companies still run on tandem... if you search down to the core of dell, maybe you will find a tandem... somewhere...
The point of new operating systems, at least started by people with any sort of realistic expectations, isn't to displace the Linux, Windows, and UNIX installations of the world. The main purpose is to do that sort of experimentation which requires completely rewriting the very core levels of the system.
For example, microkernel research---can you imagine doing microkernel research without starting from scratch? Modifying, say, the Linux kernel to operate as a microkernel? Of course not, that's simply ridiculous. You had to have Mach before you could run with the ideas, tinker with them, and then produce something like L4. Even today, microkernels are rarely used (they're one of those perenial next big things), but a lot of interesting ideas came out of it, which has moved back into the more traditional OS space.
One of the real impediments to new operating systems isn't that there aren't any applications, or that it won't run Microsoft Word or Firefox---people doing basic OS research don't care about that, as long as they can run a few simple programs to test out their ideas. The real problem is when you try to go beyond the trivial, that you eventually have to add a POSIX layer to leverage all the *NIX application source code out there. At that point, in order to make performance not suck you often have to sacrifice a considerable amount of what made your original concept so interesting to begin with to fit the POSIX model.
Innovation can be done, but POSIX compatibility can make it much, much harder.
If I have an OS that lets me easily install and run other OSes, and I have very fast internet, and lots of vm and vdisk, and you write something cool in YourVeryOwnOS, I'll download the whole thing. All it has to be is quick and easy.. and I don't necessarily even care about the neato features that made YVOO appealing to you, as long as the app you wrote for it does something I want or need.
-- Tony Lawrence
Heda