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."

Comments

The reason I haven't used them.

[nEoN nOoDlE]

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.

Re:The reason I haven't used them.

[suraklin]

I cannot answer for anyone else but I read your post and decided to put in my $.02.

I personally bought BeOS 4 after trying out the bootable demo cd that was available at the time.

When I loaded the demo I went from BIOS to full useability in under 20 seconds, so I thought that was pretty cool.

My BeOS machine was an extra computer at I had laying around. After a few weeks of using the OS and finding I could do mostly everything I did on my windows box(email,websurf,rip mp3s,listen to said mp3s with the wonderful soundplay) I decided to move the HDD into my main computer and dual boot windows and Be. For about a year I used BeOS a majority of the time.

I will admit there was one reason I never gave up Windows totally for Be...games. I liked a lot of the freeware games for Be, mostly puzzle games but none of the mainstream dev houses would port for it. I finally had to give up on Be after OS5 came out and they took more out than they put in. I think I enjoyed it most for the potential it had, probably the same reason I still have and Amiga 500 in a corner that still gets used.

It's about using getting stuff done...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It's about using getting stuff done...

[MyDixieWrecked]

Like the woman who used to do typesetting for my dad, who, until recently was still using an old IIsi with 17mb of RAM, a 40mb HD and running Quark3.32 on a 13" monochrome monitor.

I don't know how she did it.

Ignoring the obvious

[93 Escort Wagon]

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.

People are lazy

[Maxwell'sSilverLART]

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.

Re:Duh....

[vondo]

Not to mention that Linux filled a real need. There were tons of Unix people who wanted to run something familiar on their PC. Linux was a way they could do that without shelling out a lot of money. In that since, Linux wasn't a "new" OS as much as a new implementation of an "old" OS.

Now linux is in a position for a small number of converts from other OSes, but it needed the installed Unix user base to get to that point.

NicheOS's - Niche Hardware or Great Features?

[billstewart]

I've used a couple of niche OS's - PalmOS was clunky but had good applications on it, the Psion 3A's OS was a lot smoother and everybody really raved about the 32-bit version on the Psion 5, but alas, while the hardware was nearly bulletproof, after about the tenth time you drop it onto concrete the hinges eventually die. I'm not a gamer, so I don't have game-console OS's. MacOS? Sure, if I wanted everything to be pretty-looking and Just Work.

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.

EROS-os and Plan 9, however, are cool!

[billstewart]

One Niche OS I'd happily run on something if it were vaguely finished is EROS-OS, the Extremely Reliable Operating System, a capability-based operating system that Jon Shapiro worked on. The security possibilities make it highly interesting, and it's designed so you can do things like unplug the machine in the middle of a calculation, plug it in again, and have it start up where it left off. And Plan 9 and its successors were designed for scalability and resource-location transparency.

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.)

Java VM

[fredrickleo]

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.

Re:Duh....

[level_headed_midwest]

Well, I think that may have explained some of the very first Linux users. But I honestly think that many Linux users are like me, somebody who has never seen a Unix machine and want to switch from Windows because of various reasons. I switched because of stability issues and also a little out of curiosity to be 100% honest. For me, Linux *is* just another consumer desktop.

Re:Duh....

[ProfaneBaby]

There's a real fine line between doing something that no one else is doing versus doing something because you don't like the way other people did it. 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. My (admittedly limited) experience with alternative OS projects is that they're trying to solve problems that others have already solved. A new OS probably won't make that much of a difference to me.


This is usually the case, but some forks of existing code bases (consider dragonfly bsd) are very talented developers who have ideas that can't possibly be worked into larger problems because of the disruption they would cause. DFBSD should be incorporating some "new" concepts that (as far as I can tell) aren't in ANY other OS. The other factors that came into play when the OS was started (much like the other BSD forks, the founder/leader was removed from an existing BSD project) seem to be mostly secondary to the technical goals.

Re:EROS-os and Plan 9, however, are cool!

[surprise_audit]

EROS-OS sounds similar to the original Tandem Non-Stop machines. Supposedly a box with only, say, 4 cpus could be configured as if it had some higher number, then when you needed more processing power, you just slap in an extra cpu card. The OS would go, "Hey look, that cpu just came back online, here's some work". The reverse was supposed to be true, too - just pop out a running cpu and the OS would simply quit sending work to it. I guess there may have been a "nice" way to inform the OS of the changes, but it was supposed to be resilient enough to handle it the hard way.

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...

GM said thje same thing...

[Anna Merikin]

...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.

Re:Duh....

[ssj_195]

The very comprehensive DEs like GNOME and KDE are very bloated, but the more stripped-down DEs and WMs (XFCE, fvwm, ICEwm etc) still run very fast, if you won't miss all the functionality of GNOME and KDE.

Happily, the Linux Desktop developers are aware of this and are actively optimising everything all across the board, from Kernel to X to the desktop libraries to the DEs themselves.

GNOME and KDE will probably never run well on, say, 96MB of RAM, but at least the trend is to get faster and less memory-hungry - unlike the OS of a certain rival purveyor ;)

Step by step

[RoLi]

I figure for any sort of mass exodus to another OS, we'd need to get the functionality to within 95% and the familarity near 80%. That's a long way to go, towards a moving target. I have my doubts we'll ever do that.

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:

• It's used by an office suite that is free as in beer, yet there is also a commercial variant available
• It's used as default format by different office suites (OO and KOffice, hopefully Abiword will join in a couple of years)
• It's an ISO-standard (= great for government contracts)
• It's also a standard that will not change with every version. That's the biggest advantage.
• It's available everywhere, not just on the latest versions of Windows. It's also available on older versions of Windows, Linux, MacOSX and Solaris
• It's used by OO which is pretty good backwards-compatible to MSO

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.

Re:Good luck trying to have changed incorporated

[master_p]

The exact same thing goes on in every open source project, either O/Ses, game libraries, generic libraries etc. I expected a better quality of people in open source projects, because I naively thought that open source programmers will be more idealistic.

What I found greatly shocked me. Open source programmers are like politicians: once they are successful, they protect their position in every way possible, without hesitating to publically embarrass you in forums, even if you explain to them with a million arguments that their piece of code is wrong.

I had such an experience with a gaming programming library (it's name starts with A..., and the word is of Latin origin). The library's forums are basically 'run' by a few people in the same way that Mafia runs its business: if you want in, you have to kiss the boss' hand. If you don't, then every comment you make will be used against you, they will humiliate you in public, and you will be banned for just daring to disagree and present your arguments. There are a bunch of people playing the leaders, and all the rest follow with sheep mentality. Let me give you an example: one of the "leaders" posted a library add on for 2d parallax scrolling that run in 30 FPS; I took the code and made it run in over 70 FPS; instead of the community being happy that such a good piece of code existed, I was told to "play with the program" and "show my respect", otherwise I would be banned! After that (and lots of other things), I quitted not only participating in the forums but basically gave up any plans of offering work for the open source world. It is just so much hypocrisy around, that I now think (and you may laugh about it) that humanity is doomed to self destruction with such attitude.

By the way, that library has been in version 4 for quite a few years, with an API good enough for DOS but not for modern O/Ses like Windows or Linux. There was a try to modernize it, but version 5 died a painful death due to 'internal politics' (i.e. its developers all wanted the biggest share of the fame pie, so the project naturally died).

I too apologise for the bitterness, but I had to say it, because I consider it totally stupid for humanity to act like that. We can accomplish great things working together, but it seems noone wants them unless they are the protagonists.