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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.
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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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
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
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
True that. I look at the AROS project (x86 Amiga, more or less) every now and then, but if I hadn't had an Amiga back in the day, I'd never even know it existed. Lack of advertising is a key reason many alternative OS never come to fruition.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
...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
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
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
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.
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! ^^
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)
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/
Sometimes the problem is getting out of the weight of years of obselete technology. Witness the problems MS is having shipping Longhorn.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
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
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
"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.
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~
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.
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.
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