5 ms·

> if something new were to come along it would have to have something that makes it interesting socially and I'm not sure there's a lot of room for improvement

> if something new were to come along it would have to have something that makes it interesting socially and I'm not sure there's a lot of room for improvement The Innovator's Dilemma model of technology disruption suggests that the "next Linux" will be worse in most ways but better for some narrow use case. Perhaps bare-metal containers or unikernels on servers and something like Google's Fuchsia or some RTOS for mobile phones and IoT devices?

doctorpangloss 8y ago
> better for some narrow use case The examples you gave boil down to 3 narrow use cases: - The retention project / intellectually stimulating activity of writing your own operating system. - Licensing. - Some really specific hardware, where in some sense you're building an operating system in name only. Might as well just call it an application. I think what OP means by "interesting socially" is that the new Linux isn't going to succeed on any technical or economic merits. My guess would be the next Linux innovates in some way concerning national or ethnic identity, environmental conscientiousness, or radical politics. For example, an operating system written in a non-Latin alphabet programming language. Or an operating system that is only delivered for solar-powered hardware. Or whatever is going to be the radical anarchism or communism of the software world (if you think GPL / free software is that, it ain't).
swiley 8y ago
> RTOS for mobile phones The market has clearly demonstrated that it doesn't care about phones being real time. They used to be considered critical systems from what I understand and many did actually run realtime OSes. Now we've got android and iOS (android is about as far from an RTOS as you can get, it's almost impossible to write an app that's not guaranteed to just killed by the OS at some point.)
- DaiPlusPlus 8y ago
  The RTOS stuff happens in the handset’s baseband processor. The user-facing GUI environment has no hard real-time constraints.

doctorpangloss 8y ago

> better for some narrow use case The examples you gave boil down to 3 narrow use cases: - The retention project / intellectually stimulating activity of writing your own operating system. - Licensing. - Some really specific hardware, where in some sense you're building an operating system in name only. Might as well just call it an application. I think what OP means by "interesting socially" is that the new Linux isn't going to succeed on any technical or economic merits. My guess would be the next Linux innovates in some way concerning national or ethnic identity, environmental conscientiousness, or radical politics. For example, an operating system written in a non-Latin alphabet programming language. Or an operating system that is only delivered for solar-powered hardware. Or whatever is going to be the radical anarchism or communism of the software world (if you think GPL / free software is that, it ain't).

swiley 8y ago

> RTOS for mobile phones The market has clearly demonstrated that it doesn't care about phones being real time. They used to be considered critical systems from what I understand and many did actually run realtime OSes. Now we've got android and iOS (android is about as far from an RTOS as you can get, it's almost impossible to write an app that's not guaranteed to just killed by the OS at some point.)

DaiPlusPlus 8y ago
The RTOS stuff happens in the handset’s baseband processor. The user-facing GUI environment has no hard real-time constraints.