A 21st-Century Version Of OS/2 Warp May Be Released Soon (arcanoae.com)

dryriver writes: A company named Arca Noae is working on a new release of the X86 OS/2 operating system code named "Blue Lion" and likely called ArcaOS 5 in its final release. Blue Lion wants to be a modern 21st Century OS/2 Warp, with support for the latest hardware and networking standards, a modern accelerated graphics driver, support for new cryptographic security standards, full backward compatibility with legacy OS/2, DOS and Windows 3.1 applications, suitability for use in mission-critical applications, and also, it appears, the ability to run "ported Linux applications". Blue Lion, which appears to be in closed beta with March 31st 2017 cited as the target release date, will come with up to date Firefox browser and Thunderbird mail client, Apache OpenOffice, other productivity tools, a new package manager, and software update and support subscription to ensure system stability. It is unclear from the information provided whether Blue Lion will be able to run modern Windows applications.

Comments

Competition is good

[quonset]

If it can compete against the steaming pile that is Windows 10 and the eye candy which is Macs, this is a good thing. Being able to buy a license for a machine and use it without being forced to "upgrade" or have updates automatically installed whether you want them or not would be a great leap forward.

Being able to run software which is a few years old but does what you want would also be a big plus.

Re:Uh, why?

[dbreeze]

I repair ancient Mazak CNC controls and other industrial controls. All the software is DOS/Win3.1 era stuff. No one wants to bite the bullet for new CNC systems because they can't find the mechanical quality to compare at a reasonable price. Unfortunately, there's probably not a single piece of electronics for these systems left in the world that hasn't already been through one repair cycle. Most of the PCB's I see have been patched, doctored, and abused to near death, but they keep coming. Mazak has quit all support for these dinosaurs, but they're still sitting on most of the schematics, source code, etc.
My boss would love to see a modern OS with good support for his ancient software packages that all the original vendors have walked away from supporting, and won't release anything for others to work with.

If Trump wants to impress me, he'll get around to doing something to clean up the copyright/patent fiasco that is killing so many smaller players like us.

Re:Sorry, it's time has passed

[bill_mcgonigle]

OS/2 got interrupt handling exactly right. I could format a floppy, play Wolfenstein in a window, and have a mod tracker playing in the background on a 486/25. BeOS got close but was never quite as good.

My Linux machine today can't copy to a USB hard drive without making the rest of the system unusable.

It seems like Linux could still learn some tricks from these old OS's.