6 ms·
I fully welcome some more competiton on the operating system front. I am sad to see WindowsNT, Linux and macOS be the only dominant operating systems. My pers
by ThinkBeat 6y ago
I fully welcome some more competiton on the operating system front.
I am sad to see WindowsNT, Linux and macOS be the only
dominant operating systems.
My personal very perhaps unpopular view is that Windows NT
has a better technial implentation than Linux.
Linux does most things well, form small devices to big iron.
That is true now.
But when it started, it was as a learning experiment, and damn good one too. An amazing achievement.
A lot of work my haorsd of people have since built on top of it, replaced things, epanded things, hardening things, adding drivers, etc. And it has come a long way, but to
me as an operating system, technically it is not that inspiring.
I wish we had maybe 10 competitve opearing systems, some brand new off the presses.
I have run Linux in one form or another
since the first Yggdrasil release at the end of 1992.
(not very early).
It was amazing. Running it on my PC at home and it was
faster than the terminals at school (well all shared a few servers so always a lot going on, I am sure if you had it all to yourself it would be faster. I guess that is why
some people spent the nights there is they had demanding tasks to run, but htye were not a priority to get access to the better, newer and a lot more dedicated hardware. (It was a complicated process).
I could do 90% of what was needed at home, woot.
I was very happy when I get my paws on the first WindowsNT
release back in 1994 I think. I had preordered it.
I cold not wait to install it.
processor-independent, multiprocessing and multi-user operating system
the end of 1992.
After having suffered through the pain that was Widows that had a kinda sorts maybe
a little multitasking. Finally an improvement. OF course, a lot of my software
refused to run on it, or it refused to run it
The first Mac I had with macOS was also very cool, since then OpenBSD,
I had NextStep when they released it for Intel. Very cool.
Anyways I have been waiting since to get a new operating system that levels up
the game, as much as WindowsNT did for Windows 3.11, 95, 98, me.
I have not yet had that privilege.
I had good hopes for Plan9, QNX, a reimplementation fo BeOS that is still ongoing.
(I might have the wrong name on that one. I remember a demo I had at the university
of a BeBox with the BeOs and how well it multitasked what backed then seemed like
very CPU intensive graphics manipulation while playing a video and some other
stuff -at the time-... I never got a BeBox and havent run its OS)
There have been, and are some solid research OSs but they have never made it
out into the real world.
WindowsNT, Linux and macOS cannot be all we are given.
What replaces them?
Where is WindowsNTNT.
Will it take quantum computers to become the norm before we get it?
Maybe Linux already runs on that too.
(if quantum computers ever become viable or even a good fit for everyday boring
computer stuff).
Give me a new operating system, written from scratch, to implement every
secure feature it should have, harden it, eliminate even the possibility
of buffer overflows and assorted tasks, or create them so that the elements
that are exposed can fail gracefully and non-destructbily and not leak data
or allow inputting of data.
I forgot about Qubes OS, that is very interesting. Maybe that is it.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoThe BeOS "reimplementation" is called Haiku. It is a pretty remarkably mature project, though unfortunately not what I'm looking for in a new OS personally. The reason we don't see new OSs is pretty simple: there is entirely too much hardware you have to accommodate to be usable. There are klocs of actual kernel code in Linux, and Mlocs of driver code.
- Koshkin 6y agoI think the answer is to have device drivers implemented as part of device firmware.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoOh, like UEFI or openfirmware drivers? That's... a pretty neat idea, actually. That would lower the barrier to entry, certainly. About the only issue I see is then trusting those drivers (I don't really trust hardware mfgs, and you'd have to update them somehow), but that seems doable.
- giantrobot 6y agoThat becomes extremely problematic as a lot of devices anymore ship with bare minimum firmware to turn themselves on and require the host to upload firmware to actually work. The "drivers" on disk are then the modules required by the OS and a big blob of firmware. Other times devices are just a thin PHY interface and all of the work is done in software inside the driver. There's nothing on the device to even run onboard firmware. So many devices can't store their own drivers for the host to use, let alone store drivers for multiple operating systems.
- Koshkin 6y agoSo the idea is similar to the one at the base of (the original) OpenGL, i.e. that of a hardware API that can be used by any OS.
- 6y ago