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I disagree. It's much harder now to scratch your itch than ever before. You can see it in how people like Linus Torvalds have an almost demigod status in that k
by vezzy-fnord 11y ago
I disagree. It's much harder now to scratch your itch than ever before. You can see it in how people like Linus Torvalds have an almost demigod status in that kernel hacking is considered to be a highly arcane activity. This is in stark contrast to the past, where writing operating systems was a much more mundane and common activity, not unlike writing your own web framework today.
Certainly some shortcuts like DDE, rump kernels and emerging flavors of libOS are now coming around, but it's still an uphill battle.
- reagency 11y agoKernel hacking was always arcane, the original greybeard wizard stereotype. With the modern Internet community it became more accessible. At the same time, a million JS webdevs ALSO appeared to work on the big was.
- pjc50 11y agowriting operating systems was a much more mundane and common activity [citation needed] - outside of academic environments. I suppose the embedded environment might count as building your own micro-operating system (only one task? don't bother with a scheduler etc).
- nickpsecurity 11y agoJust look at the Wikipedia Timeline of Operating Systems with special attention to number of distinct OS's in any given time period. You'll find it drops off sharply as it nears the present if you count stuff that was actually deployed or in working condition. Well, that was the situation when I looked at it a year ago. Hopefully you come back with good, contrary news. :) Another example is sheer amount of dead, search results I get for OS projects on sites that track them. Almost all are before 2010 with most closer to the late 90's. I'm not sure why this is but there's just hardly anyone doing it anymore. Maybe it's because they google it and see how hard it is with all the dead projects. ;)