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How hard is it to write your own OS ? Based on experience of Gates and Torvals, I think someone will eventually write an owesome Operating System that will be b
by joering2 7y ago
How hard is it to write your own OS ? Based on experience of Gates and Torvals, I think someone will eventually write an owesome Operating System that will be beautiful abd flashy yet yseful and wont steal user data to make extra money.
- n0rbwah 7y agoYou'll need to have strong backward compatibility with a popular system for it to have chance to become popular. MS-DOS was compatible with CP/M when it came out and MS kept working on backward compatibility since then. Linux was unix-like and filled a hole for a FOSS unix-like OS at the right time. The GNU utilities were among the first things that were made to work on it and it was kinda source-compatible with other unixes. If your new system requires that everything under the sun gets ported to it before people can use their favorite tools, it will fail. BTW, Gates didn't write his own OS, he bought it and got people in his company to work on it.
- toyg 7y agoIt’s so ironic how Gates, who looked and acted as a stereotypical übergeek, found ultimate success by... being a shrewd businessman and doing as little own work as possible. And still, most non-IT people think he was some sort of hacker genius.
- rhinoceraptor 7y agoWriting an OS isn't that hard. After all, Lion's Commentary on Unix is only 250 pages. But if you actually want the OS to be useful and have modern features, then you're looking at hundreds or thousands of person years rather than a couple months. Plus all the time you'd need after convincing the world to port their software to your new OS.