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Is that you, Dave Cutler? But more seriously, what do you want from an OS? Cleaner design? Plan 9 comes to mind. QNX is very elegant, too. Some microkernel thi

Is that you, Dave Cutler? But more seriously, what do you want from an OS? Cleaner design? Plan 9 comes to mind. QNX is very elegant, too. Some microkernel thing? Fuchsia, but some say it's inelegant and overdesigned right off the bat. Minix has some nice properties but somehow nobody but Intel seems to use it. Also, QNX again (but as the name suggests it's similar to Unix)... Distributed computing? I don't know, seems OK to run it mostly in user space. My favorite alternatives are Plan 9, QNX and L4 (I know it's not an OS), of which QNX is the only one I have actually used. Shame about Fuchsia, I believe the negative opinions because I looked at some documentation and code before I read them and had a sort of "THAT is supposed to be Google's better OS?!" moment.

Animats 4y ago
QNX got a lot of things right, mainly in the area of interprocess communication. Interprocess communication came late to Unix/Linux, and it shows. Microservices under QNX work much better than under Linux. Interprocess communication is fast and works like a synchronous function call. Hard real time actually works with QNX. But QNX had nothing new on the database side.
stragies 4y ago
RIM (The Blackberry people) bought QNX. Do you know, if they have been good shepherds? Has that helped, or disadvantaged QNX as a viable solution proposal in the project space it had?.
- ahartmetz 4y ago
  I'm not well informed. AFAIK customers like Porsche and Ford (with the fairly successful Sync 3 infotainment system) are still using it. I do know that Dan Dodge, QNX founder, developer 1 and great guy (speaker of my all time favorite conference keynote), has left Blackberry. Rumor has it that he was unhappy with the new leadership and direction for QNX.
kjellsbells 4y ago
My concern isnt about Windows or Linux specifically but that something is lost when the garden only grows two plants. In, say, 1980 there were several unique OS streams, each with their own quirks: UNIX, Pick, VMS, etc. It seems strange that we are essentially trading on isotopes of OS thinking from about 2000 when Linux took the mantle of UNIX and Windows converged on the XP code. Is this it? Is producing an OS now so incredibly expensive and hard that we are never going to try again, and just keep bolting things on to what we have? I feel a little sad at that, even if the reasoning is impeccable.
- palata 4y ago
  Maybe it converged, just like other industries? Say, cars or planes have not fundamentally changed in decades. But would there be other designs that would make them so much better that it would be worth changing? That's not clear to me...
  - MomoXenosaga 4y ago
    There's no money to be made in making an OS. Back when I was a child people were literally waiting outside stores for a new Windows. Windows 11 is given away for free.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  We'll always have TempleOS ! /ducks (RIP)

Animats 4y ago

QNX got a lot of things right, mainly in the area of interprocess communication. Interprocess communication came late to Unix/Linux, and it shows. Microservices under QNX work much better than under Linux. Interprocess communication is fast and works like a synchronous function call. Hard real time actually works with QNX. But QNX had nothing new on the database side.

stragies 4y ago

RIM (The Blackberry people) bought QNX. Do you know, if they have been good shepherds? Has that helped, or disadvantaged QNX as a viable solution proposal in the project space it had?.

ahartmetz 4y ago
I'm not well informed. AFAIK customers like Porsche and Ford (with the fairly successful Sync 3 infotainment system) are still using it. I do know that Dan Dodge, QNX founder, developer 1 and great guy (speaker of my all time favorite conference keynote), has left Blackberry. Rumor has it that he was unhappy with the new leadership and direction for QNX.

kjellsbells 4y ago

My concern isnt about Windows or Linux specifically but that something is lost when the garden only grows two plants. In, say, 1980 there were several unique OS streams, each with their own quirks: UNIX, Pick, VMS, etc. It seems strange that we are essentially trading on isotopes of OS thinking from about 2000 when Linux took the mantle of UNIX and Windows converged on the XP code. Is this it? Is producing an OS now so incredibly expensive and hard that we are never going to try again, and just keep bolting things on to what we have? I feel a little sad at that, even if the reasoning is impeccable.

palata 4y ago
Maybe it converged, just like other industries? Say, cars or planes have not fundamentally changed in decades. But would there be other designs that would make them so much better that it would be worth changing? That's not clear to me...
- MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  There's no money to be made in making an OS. Back when I was a child people were literally waiting outside stores for a new Windows. Windows 11 is given away for free.
BlueTemplar 4y ago
We'll always have TempleOS ! /ducks (RIP)