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I wonder what he'd say today, if he were to give his updated opinions on modern operating systems. I didn't even exist when this was written, but as far I know,

I wonder what he'd say today, if he were to give his updated opinions on modern operating systems. I didn't even exist when this was written, but as far I know, OSes are extremely different today. This was still before MS was even hinting at having NT take over as the mainline Windows OS. And then, the macOS of today probably has a lot more in common with NeXTSTEP than classic MacOS, so I'm curious if he changed his opinion on it after OS X came out. The most timeless thing here is Linux retaining its "highest hacker to user ratio".

deaddodo 1y ago
Knowing Carmack, and the market, not much would change about this. Windows still rules the roost, though it wouldn’t be referred to as Win32 today for various reasons. Linux is even more important today, given the Steam Deck and Proton; but still a smaller market than Windows. And macOS is even more of the third-option today given their antagonistic support to OpenGL/Vulkan and non-Apple-first developers (in general). If anything, Linux would probably be switched to first since Carmack was always a hardline supporter and it seems to have the most capture velocity; but that’s still quite unlikely. And obviously all the other platforms would be missing from the list altogether given the triopoly/triculture that the modern desktop OS sphere has evolved into.
- doctorpangloss 1y ago
  Why not count Android as Linux? It’s the biggest Vulkan target, by far. Is John Carmack the Ja Rule of programming?
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Because the only Linux thing Android exposes to userspace is the Linux kernel. Everything else is either Java/Kotlin based or the set of official NDK APIs. https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis It is hit and miss if using unstable APIs works across devices.
    - Zambyte 1y ago
      The Linux kernel is the only Linux thing. There is nothing else Linux to expose.
- branko_d 1y ago
  > Windows still rules the roost, though it wouldn’t be referred to as Win32 today for various reasons. Win32 is stable, supported and will stay supported forever, as various technologies built on top of it come and go. It is the API for the OS. > Linux is even more important today, given the Steam Deck and Proton Which uses Win32 under the hood! There is a running joke that Win32 is the Linux's most stable API.
  - xeonmc 1y ago
    Win32 will be preserved forever in a glass museum case with life support bolted on -- just like how in Valve’s Source Engine, the Quake physics component (Qphysics) is treated as a ancient artifact to be called upon when its power needs to be channeled, but kept isolated from the "normal" VPhysics lest its Eldritch power corrupt the rest of the codebase. Though judging from how CS2 is going, it seems that the quarantine measures aren’t particularly airtight.
    - flohofwoe 1y ago
      > Win32 will be preserved forever in a glass museum case with life support bolted on And that's a good thing because for game development you don't need much more from the OS, just enough to get a window, input events, audio and networking. All the interesting stuff all happens in the 3D APIs, and those have changed a lot since the early 2000s.
  - deaddodo 1y ago
    What you’re referring to as “Win32” is WinAPI and its derivative/wrapper technologies. Which can include WinRT, WinUI3, MFC, etc. And “Win32” as a reference to the platform is well gone, as it’s exclusively “Win64” on the x86 side these days. Thus why I said it would be unlikely he would refer to it as “Win32” specifically today. But yes, if you conflate “Win32” to “native Windows API” (even that term will be controversial, so replace “native” with “legacy” at your preference), it’s all the same today as then.
    - flohofwoe 1y ago
- otabdeveloper4 1y ago
  > Windows still rules the roost Windows is a legacy OS that isn't developed anymore and only exists to support the Excel cash cow.
andrewf 1y ago
He mentions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_(operating_system) in the NeXTSTEP section, which was a stepping stone to OS X. Windows stuck as the id tooling platform. I'm guessing by the time OS X was relevant, id Software had grown and all the tooling that would've benefited from Interface Builder was maintained by different folks. And Carmack was focused on getting the most out of various graphics cards, where Win32 drivers were both the cutting edge and what consumers had.
xxr 1y ago
> The most timeless thing here is Linux retaining its "highest hacker to user ratio". More so than BSD? Or still more than just the OSs Carmack listed?
- tavavex 1y ago
  Honestly, I didn't even think of BSD. I actually don't know anyone who uses it on a personal level, I assumed it was more of an OS that you had to use for your job. But I guess, given how niche it is for individual use, you'd be right. But to be pedantic, if you took something really obscure (like hobbyist OSes that have little practical use), you'd probably get to a 100% "hacker" user base.
  - cyberpunk 1y ago
    Playstation, Juniper, NetApp, Netflix to name a few small users. If you touch any of these, you use it too.
    - flohofwoe 1y ago
      Don't forget macOS and iOS, Darwin is also derived from BSD.
    - tavavex 1y ago
      I know many OSes are based on FreeBSD, I assumed that OP implied people who used the actual standard distribution of it, not highly-customized embedded or similar versions. Also, using Netflix wouldn't make one a BSD user just because it's what they run on their servers.
- flohofwoe 1y ago
  In 1997 Linux was still so niche that the hacker-to-user-ratio was definitely on par with BSD.
  - fulafel 1y ago
    BSD was much less desktop oriented then, and there wasn't newbie friendly documentation around. Whereas it was a niche but still relatively common for teenage hobbyists to install Linux, get X11 running, read the HOWTOs and surf the web with Netscape for Linux[1] on the home (or school) PC and geeking out on all the Unix things that you heard the older kids got to use at the university lab workstations. You could argue those users had the hacker spirit of course and many of them did learn programming as well after a while since you still ended up building stuff from source half the time when you wanted to install something. It helped that you could easily get your hands on cheap Linux install CDs in bookstores and computer shops. [1] Netscape seems to have been at version 4.0 by 1997. WP thinks version 2 was already available for Linux.
CTDOCodebases 1y ago
If anything the "highest hacker to user ratio" has diminished since then. Hardware compatibility was a major issue. Even if hardware was compatible with Linux it often wouldn't work out of the box. Most homes had only a single internet connected device so if you borked your system you had to have friends that would know how to guide you to fix it over the phone or you had to travel to someone else house to check the internet then come back and try what you wrote down. Users who had no patience for this would get filtered out of the userbase.
- tavavex 1y ago
  There are far more mainstream Linux users (and "serious" business users) today than back in the day, but it still has the highest ratio among all modern-day systems. The statement still holds.
  - scuff3d 1y ago
    In terms of ratio today I would assume BSD would have the highest. Near 100% frankly.
    - bigyabai 1y ago
      That too can be swayed if you define it realistically. The modern Playstation operating system is based on FreeBSD, which isn't entirely pure but feels like fair game considering the BSD license.
      - scuff3d 1y ago
        Fair point. But if we're going to include that we have to include Android in the Linux camp. Which is gonna dumpster the Linux ratio.
        Gud 1y ago
        Android uses OpenBSDs libc, though. Unless it's changed in the last 10 years.
flohofwoe 1y ago
> OSes are extremely different today. Are they though? Except for Windows everything else has become a UNIX (even on game consoles, Xbox runs a Windows derivate and PlayStation runs on a BSD kernel, only Nintendo is still doing their own thing). The OS diversity in the 90s was much bigger than today, AmigaOS, RiscOS, AtariTOS, BeOS and the original MacOS were all siginificantly different from each other, much more different than Linux vs macOS vs Android vs iOS.
- tavavex 1y ago
  Doesn't the dramatic decrease in diversity and the general streamlining/convergence of the remaining options also qualify as being "extremely different" when compared to the 90s?

deaddodo 1y ago

Knowing Carmack, and the market, not much would change about this. Windows still rules the roost, though it wouldn’t be referred to as Win32 today for various reasons. Linux is even more important today, given the Steam Deck and Proton; but still a smaller market than Windows. And macOS is even more of the third-option today given their antagonistic support to OpenGL/Vulkan and non-Apple-first developers (in general). If anything, Linux would probably be switched to first since Carmack was always a hardline supporter and it seems to have the most capture velocity; but that’s still quite unlikely. And obviously all the other platforms would be missing from the list altogether given the triopoly/triculture that the modern desktop OS sphere has evolved into.

doctorpangloss 1y ago
Why not count Android as Linux? It’s the biggest Vulkan target, by far. Is John Carmack the Ja Rule of programming?
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Because the only Linux thing Android exposes to userspace is the Linux kernel. Everything else is either Java/Kotlin based or the set of official NDK APIs. https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis It is hit and miss if using unstable APIs works across devices.
  - Zambyte 1y ago
    The Linux kernel is the only Linux thing. There is nothing else Linux to expose.
branko_d 1y ago
> Windows still rules the roost, though it wouldn’t be referred to as Win32 today for various reasons. Win32 is stable, supported and will stay supported forever, as various technologies built on top of it come and go. It is the API for the OS. > Linux is even more important today, given the Steam Deck and Proton Which uses Win32 under the hood! There is a running joke that Win32 is the Linux's most stable API.
- xeonmc 1y ago
  Win32 will be preserved forever in a glass museum case with life support bolted on -- just like how in Valve’s Source Engine, the Quake physics component (Qphysics) is treated as a ancient artifact to be called upon when its power needs to be channeled, but kept isolated from the "normal" VPhysics lest its Eldritch power corrupt the rest of the codebase. Though judging from how CS2 is going, it seems that the quarantine measures aren’t particularly airtight.
  - flohofwoe 1y ago
    > Win32 will be preserved forever in a glass museum case with life support bolted on And that's a good thing because for game development you don't need much more from the OS, just enough to get a window, input events, audio and networking. All the interesting stuff all happens in the 3D APIs, and those have changed a lot since the early 2000s.
- deaddodo 1y ago
  What you’re referring to as “Win32” is WinAPI and its derivative/wrapper technologies. Which can include WinRT, WinUI3, MFC, etc. And “Win32” as a reference to the platform is well gone, as it’s exclusively “Win64” on the x86 side these days. Thus why I said it would be unlikely he would refer to it as “Win32” specifically today. But yes, if you conflate “Win32” to “native Windows API” (even that term will be controversial, so replace “native” with “legacy” at your preference), it’s all the same today as then.
  - flohofwoe 1y ago
otabdeveloper4 1y ago
> Windows still rules the roost Windows is a legacy OS that isn't developed anymore and only exists to support the Excel cash cow.

andrewf 1y ago

He mentions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_(operating_system) in the NeXTSTEP section, which was a stepping stone to OS X. Windows stuck as the id tooling platform. I'm guessing by the time OS X was relevant, id Software had grown and all the tooling that would've benefited from Interface Builder was maintained by different folks. And Carmack was focused on getting the most out of various graphics cards, where Win32 drivers were both the cutting edge and what consumers had.

xxr 1y ago

> The most timeless thing here is Linux retaining its "highest hacker to user ratio". More so than BSD? Or still more than just the OSs Carmack listed?

tavavex 1y ago
Honestly, I didn't even think of BSD. I actually don't know anyone who uses it on a personal level, I assumed it was more of an OS that you had to use for your job. But I guess, given how niche it is for individual use, you'd be right. But to be pedantic, if you took something really obscure (like hobbyist OSes that have little practical use), you'd probably get to a 100% "hacker" user base.
- cyberpunk 1y ago
  Playstation, Juniper, NetApp, Netflix to name a few small users. If you touch any of these, you use it too.
  - flohofwoe 1y ago
    Don't forget macOS and iOS, Darwin is also derived from BSD.
  - tavavex 1y ago
    I know many OSes are based on FreeBSD, I assumed that OP implied people who used the actual standard distribution of it, not highly-customized embedded or similar versions. Also, using Netflix wouldn't make one a BSD user just because it's what they run on their servers.
flohofwoe 1y ago
In 1997 Linux was still so niche that the hacker-to-user-ratio was definitely on par with BSD.
- fulafel 1y ago
  BSD was much less desktop oriented then, and there wasn't newbie friendly documentation around. Whereas it was a niche but still relatively common for teenage hobbyists to install Linux, get X11 running, read the HOWTOs and surf the web with Netscape for Linux[1] on the home (or school) PC and geeking out on all the Unix things that you heard the older kids got to use at the university lab workstations. You could argue those users had the hacker spirit of course and many of them did learn programming as well after a while since you still ended up building stuff from source half the time when you wanted to install something. It helped that you could easily get your hands on cheap Linux install CDs in bookstores and computer shops. [1] Netscape seems to have been at version 4.0 by 1997. WP thinks version 2 was already available for Linux.

CTDOCodebases 1y ago

If anything the "highest hacker to user ratio" has diminished since then. Hardware compatibility was a major issue. Even if hardware was compatible with Linux it often wouldn't work out of the box. Most homes had only a single internet connected device so if you borked your system you had to have friends that would know how to guide you to fix it over the phone or you had to travel to someone else house to check the internet then come back and try what you wrote down. Users who had no patience for this would get filtered out of the userbase.

tavavex 1y ago
There are far more mainstream Linux users (and "serious" business users) today than back in the day, but it still has the highest ratio among all modern-day systems. The statement still holds.
- scuff3d 1y ago
  In terms of ratio today I would assume BSD would have the highest. Near 100% frankly.
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    That too can be swayed if you define it realistically. The modern Playstation operating system is based on FreeBSD, which isn't entirely pure but feels like fair game considering the BSD license.
    - scuff3d 1y ago
      Fair point. But if we're going to include that we have to include Android in the Linux camp. Which is gonna dumpster the Linux ratio.
      - Gud 1y ago
        Android uses OpenBSDs libc, though. Unless it's changed in the last 10 years.

flohofwoe 1y ago

> OSes are extremely different today. Are they though? Except for Windows everything else has become a UNIX (even on game consoles, Xbox runs a Windows derivate and PlayStation runs on a BSD kernel, only Nintendo is still doing their own thing). The OS diversity in the 90s was much bigger than today, AmigaOS, RiscOS, AtariTOS, BeOS and the original MacOS were all siginificantly different from each other, much more different than Linux vs macOS vs Android vs iOS.

tavavex 1y ago
Doesn't the dramatic decrease in diversity and the general streamlining/convergence of the remaining options also qualify as being "extremely different" when compared to the 90s?