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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.
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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
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
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
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.
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
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! ^^
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...
...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.
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.