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I remember when home computing was full of neat hobby OSs. It was fun. Then somewhere around the last 20 years everyone stopped writing kernels and just built L

I remember when home computing was full of neat hobby OSs. It was fun. Then somewhere around the last 20 years everyone stopped writing kernels and just built Linux distros instead (and these days you don’t even see that much variety in Linux any more either). Anyhow, this project looks really inspiring. At least from a quick cursory glance. Looking forward to digging a little deeper tonight.

fooblat 8y ago
> (and these days you don’t even see that much variety in Linux any more either) I beg to differ! While I do see that there are a a handful of very popular distros, there are tons more out there! Spend a few minutes poking around DistroWatch[0] and see if you don't agree. 0. https://distrowatch.com/ https://distrowatch.com/
- pushpop 8y ago
  I'm not on about quantity of distros, I'm on about variety. A thousand Ubuntu derivatives doesn't add much variation. systemd hasn't helped much here either because there used to be a lot of variety in how distro's would implement sysv. There even used to be distros that rolled their own file system hierarchy. Some might see the grand unification a good thing for interoperability and developers - and I don't disagree with them. But it was fun looking at the different ways different distros would solve the same problem. Whereas now the biggest difference between a lot of distros is a great deal more superficial.
  - fooblat 8y ago
    I agree that the majority of distros are based on debian/ubuntu/fedora but there are still some significantly different ones out there. The most interesting/useful of these for me lately has been void linux[0]. It is based around runit (instead of systemd) and has a very nice native package manager as well. 0. https://voidlinux.org/ https://voidlinux.org/
    - pushpop 8y ago
      I'm not saying there isn't still some distinct ones out there. I'm saying in there is less variety than there used to be. variety is the key description I used. Sure there are few outliers still but the rest are just systemd + (apt|rpm) and there this really the same as what Linux was like 20 years ago where even Debian and Redhat were distinctly different from one another. Even Arch has come into the fold somewhat over the years.
tracker1 8y ago
I think a lot of it comes down to scratching an itch vs. being productive. I'd love to see something new gain traction, I just don't see it happening. Linux pretty much controls the services market (so much so that WSL and LCW are a thing). Windows and MacOS rule the roost on the desktop, though I think ChromeOS have carved a niche that I wouldn't mind seeing mature, and not become Android Desktop. There's some cool experiments out there. Who knows anymore. One of the great things of everything (even on the desktop) being a web app, is it's really made many applications more portable, it's also slowed creativity and broader adoption. Right now, 90% of the apps and tools I use run under Windows, Mac and Linux, that's pretty huge. New OSes without at least enough support for electron/v8 and a few other bits will hold them back imho. It's good and bad. I cannot speak for anyone else, to me these things are very cool. In the end, I have work to get done.

fooblat 8y ago

> (and these days you don’t even see that much variety in Linux any more either) I beg to differ! While I do see that there are a a handful of very popular distros, there are tons more out there! Spend a few minutes poking around DistroWatch[0] and see if you don't agree. 0. https://distrowatch.com/ https://distrowatch.com/

pushpop 8y ago
I'm not on about quantity of distros, I'm on about variety. A thousand Ubuntu derivatives doesn't add much variation. systemd hasn't helped much here either because there used to be a lot of variety in how distro's would implement sysv. There even used to be distros that rolled their own file system hierarchy. Some might see the grand unification a good thing for interoperability and developers - and I don't disagree with them. But it was fun looking at the different ways different distros would solve the same problem. Whereas now the biggest difference between a lot of distros is a great deal more superficial.
- fooblat 8y ago
  I agree that the majority of distros are based on debian/ubuntu/fedora but there are still some significantly different ones out there. The most interesting/useful of these for me lately has been void linux[0]. It is based around runit (instead of systemd) and has a very nice native package manager as well. 0. https://voidlinux.org/ https://voidlinux.org/
  - pushpop 8y ago
    I'm not saying there isn't still some distinct ones out there. I'm saying in there is less variety than there used to be. variety is the key description I used. Sure there are few outliers still but the rest are just systemd + (apt|rpm) and there this really the same as what Linux was like 20 years ago where even Debian and Redhat were distinctly different from one another. Even Arch has come into the fold somewhat over the years.

tracker1 8y ago

I think a lot of it comes down to scratching an itch vs. being productive. I'd love to see something new gain traction, I just don't see it happening. Linux pretty much controls the services market (so much so that WSL and LCW are a thing). Windows and MacOS rule the roost on the desktop, though I think ChromeOS have carved a niche that I wouldn't mind seeing mature, and not become Android Desktop. There's some cool experiments out there. Who knows anymore. One of the great things of everything (even on the desktop) being a web app, is it's really made many applications more portable, it's also slowed creativity and broader adoption. Right now, 90% of the apps and tools I use run under Windows, Mac and Linux, that's pretty huge. New OSes without at least enough support for electron/v8 and a few other bits will hold them back imho. It's good and bad. I cannot speak for anyone else, to me these things are very cool. In the end, I have work to get done.