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Ask Slashdot: Innovative Operating Systems/Distros In 2015?
iamacat writes: Back in 90s, we used Linux not only because of open source, but also for innovative features not found in commercial operating systems — better multitasking, network power features like slirp and masquerading, free developer tools for many languages. Nowadays OSX and Windows caught up in these areas and mainstream distros like Ubuntu dumbed down in default configuration. So where to go for active innovation like 3D/VR desktop, artificial intelligence, drag and drop ability to mash up UI of multiple apps or just drastically better performance? Something maybe rough around the edges but usable and exciting enough to use as daily desktop?
Take a look at Squeak ( http://squeak.org/ ). As it turns out most things in the future will have their roots in the discarded ideas of the past. As far as programming languages take a look at Erlang and Elixir (computer languages are the operating systems of the future). I expect the capability model and the actor model will get a lot more popular in the future. In the future computers will be networks, applications will be distributed applications.
BSD is not a commercial OS and isn't in competition with Linux.
Linux brought those things to the consumer desktop. In the 2000's it not only continued to gain functionality but actually gained polish. Today, Linux is at least as polished and pretty as Windows or OSX.
The only people still using BSD (and honestly most of the "hardcore" distributions of Linux) are people who appreciate difficulty for it's own sake. Unlike windows and OSX you trade no functionality for the polished experience. You simply fall back to manual effort when you need more flexibility than the polished tools provide and most of the time the polished tools break none of it.
If you have trouble with rpmbuild; yum -y local vs make; make install and therefore choose the old way and break package management thus finding yourself in a dependency hell a year later... that's because you are ignorant, perhaps willfully, and your outdated and unpolished system that gives you no added functionality is what you deserve.
For myself... I used desktop linux in 98 and have used linux in the server rack since that time. It has taken many forms and flavors for me including LFS for awhile. That was great for learning how everything works under the hood. If you are using anything but a modern user friendly linux on even a 5 yr old desktop and spending more than 2-4 hours configuring and customizing the OS itself on setup (less than windows or OS X) then I have to question your life choices. Unless are learning, why waste time manually doing things the hard way when you can point and click your way to a solid and well configured launch platform for working on the new thing you are learning now? If there is some detail that matters which you can't point and click you way to, why not help improve the polish so you can move on? The point really extends to experienced users of windows and OS X (by which I really mean the latest and greatest edition of OS X in the same way windows is nothing but the latest and greatest NT) as well.
The OS wars are over. You could make a very good argument that Linux won since it is by far the most heavily deployed OS overall. But really it's more that the war itself become obsolete because open software stacks won. Even if you are using windows outside of certain niche environments most of the software you are using is cross platform OSS and most of your experience takes place in the browser or at least the network. It really makes very little difference what OS you use because no OS actually won and therefore everything has to work everywhere.
I switched from a linux desktop back to windows for years because working on third party systems constantly meant needing windows only apps and because windows got me from scratch to a working platform more quickly. Meanwhile I continued using linux as my first choice for... everything else. Now I've switched back to find Linux Mint actually provides a smoother, easier, and prettier experience these days on my brand new high end laptop supporting all the recently released hardware out of the box. It was so quick and easy I actually did spent a little time customizing frivolous things like window behavior, desktop effects, and widgets. I'm not sure I want any new innovation on my desktop. Just keep pace and let things grow more stable. Maybe fix the odd clipboard behavior and inconsistency? Middle click paste is a cool concept but not worth the hassle. Finally fix the quirks of kmixer?
The only thing left was support for the vsphere client. The virtual F5 in my lab ties me to this and the lack of functionality in the web equivalent in newer versions also hampers me here requiring me to virtualize windows. The solution is I'll simply remove both vmware and F5 from my lab. Many enterprises still have these things but that isn't the direction of the future. The future is about the open equivalents that have caught up now on the core functionality you need from these things are easily deployed on any cloud stack giving greater flexibility and automatabil