The Incredible Shrinking Operating System

snydeq writes "The center of gravity is shifting away from the traditional, massive operating systems of the past, as even the major OSes are slimming their footprint to make code bases easier to manage and secure, and to increase the variety of devices on which they can run, InfoWorld reports. Microsoft, for one, is cutting down the number of services that run at boot to ensure Windows 7 will run across a spectrum of hardware. Linux distros such as Ubuntu are stripping out functionality, including MySQL, CUPS, and LDAP, to cut footprints in half. And Apple appears headed for a slimmed-down OS X that will enable future iPhones or tablet devices to run the same OS as the Mac. Though these developments don't necessarily mean that the browser will supplant the OS, they do show that OS vendors realize they must adapt as virtualization, cloud computing, netbooks, and power concerns drive business users toward smaller, less costly, more efficient operating environments."

Comments

Sounds Familiar.

[lobiusmoop]

Thin Clients
Mozilla Firefox

There's an apocryphal story that someone suggested a branch of Firefox that was leaned down by concentrating on the core browser functionality... what goes around...

Economy

[macaulay805]

It looks like OSes couldn't escape the economic downturn as well.

Re:No, they're not.

[Dunkirk]

Anybody advanced enough to know what MySQL is (much less how to administrate/operate it) would know how to apt-get install it if they needed it, anyway.

And anybody advanced enough to know how to actually write an application against it would know how to emerge it.

Thanks, folks. I'll be here all week. Try the veal.

What I read

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 7 will run [on] a spectrum

Great! They must have really stripped down the OS.

Re:CUPS

[godrik]

Using your trick, I found that the most time consumming application was:

root 7275 6982 0 Jan23 tty7 01:46:49 /usr/bin/Xorg :0 -br -audit 0 -auth /var/gdm/:0.Xauth -nolisten tcp vt7

I do not an X movie organizer, I should get rid of it.

Re:promising..but...

[Cormacus]

>> "Sounds promising, until you go to open Notepad and you find out you need to install it"

user@box> vim
-bash: vim: command not found
user@box> sudo apt-get install vim
    .
    .
    .
    .
Done.
user@box> vim

Seems to work ok to me!

"Grow smaller" . . .

[PolygamousRanchKid]

I was actually on a conference call concerning an Open Source thingie, when someone stated that, "We're planning in the future to 'grow smaller'"

I don't think he even believed it himself. But the sheer audacity to let those words over his lips truly amazed me.

Nuthin' ever gets 'no smaller, except your pay check, after taxes, and you take inflation into account.

Well, maybe your retirement fund . . . and the value of your house . . .

The gas tank of my car seems to be getting bigger . . . it used to hold only 50 euros of diesel, now it can hold about 75 euros! Wow, that's innovation, a growing gas tank!