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Crowding out OpenBSDCrowding out OpenBSDPosted Nov 14, 2012 5:52 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313)Parent article: Crowding out OpenBSD
Another thing to remember is that someday Linux is going to be replaced by something that has less baggage and so can be faster and more useful on the hardware of the day.
When that starts to happen, userspace projects are going to have to adapt. Those that 'just work' or only require minor tweaks will become standard on the new system. Those that are a pain because they have no provision for compatibility or the maintainers aren't willing to consider portability will end up being replaced (or forked)
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Crowding out OpenBSD Posted Nov 14, 2012 9:13 UTC (Wed) by airlied (subscriber, #9104) [Link]
But when that day comes, and something attracts enough developers to keep pace with Linux they'll have enough developers to work on the desktop envs of the day.
If you somehow believe a brand new OS will appear and they'll be happy to just have fvwm2 and not whatever DE is the DE of the day at the time, you are probably not thinking things through.
The problem with catching Linux now, is keeping up with the new hw support, doesn't matter how little baggage you have, if you can't boot on common hw.
Crowding out OpenBSD Posted Nov 14, 2012 10:25 UTC (Wed) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]
Hardware support is always the stumbling block to OS diversity, and will remain so for a long time. Probably the best that can be done for OS progress would be to build future OSes using Linux as their hardware abstraction layer. As a clearly-better OS architecture emerges, the more performance-limiting drivers will naturally migrate to the new system, ultimately leaving Linux to present a unified view of the zillions of slow and old devices. Two decades after that, we will begin to see machines that don't need a Linux driver subsystem any more -- or that have a Linux in each peripheral, forgotten.
Which parts of Linux will slough off first? Tty, memory management, file systems, networking, program loading, user process management. It will be sad, in a way, but the new OS will keep most of us from looking back.
Crowding out OpenBSD Posted Nov 14, 2012 12:33 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
This is already happening. You can run most BSDs (except apparently Darwin) as a KVM guest.
Crowding out OpenBSD Posted Nov 14, 2012 17:13 UTC (Wed) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
> Probably the best that can be done for OS progress would be to build future OSes using Linux as their hardware abstraction layer.
Some people are trying interesting variations on that theme. [1]
[1] http://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/12.05#Re-ap...
hardware + application support Posted Nov 14, 2012 14:16 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
One of my old CS lecturers taught us that an operating system does exactly two useful things:
• it provides access to the hardware you have
You fastened onto the first, there are plenty of people who claim to have a "better" operating system that doesn't work as well as Linux systems do with the hardware people have (often, with any hardware at all).
But the second is just as important. When Linux was new the various compatibility layers were vital. Everything from the ABI compatibility that later angered SCO through to projects like WINE helped make Linux a good choice for people who, like most of us, don't write everything from scratch.
Any project that thinks it's going to "be the next Linux" needs to handle both these problems well, as well as doing something _better_ than Linux.
hardware + application support Posted Nov 15, 2012 16:44 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] This may be simpler then you think. Google already is working on this problem (even if I'm not sure it realizes it). Both Android and ChromeOS use abstraction layer which separates programs from Linux to a huge degree.
Crowding out OpenBSD Posted Nov 15, 2012 12:58 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] Sorry to disappoint you, but the baggage even a minimalistic Linux system carries around today is orders of magnitude larger than what would even have been possible in the VAXen days of yore. Won't happen.
Crowding out OpenBSD Posted Nov 15, 2012 22:10 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
my point is that Linux is dragging a lot of baggage around in the form of support for old APIs and so on.
Eventually, someone will create a new OS that does a way with the accumulated baggage, and as a result is able to do things more efficently. It will probably start with some smart person putting together something for their own use 'not intended to be big and professional', just like Linux was.
It's foolish to think that Linux is the ultimate OS (or kernel).
The kernel development model (and rate of adoption in accepting changes) should push this point out a long ways, but eventually the pile of cruft will accumulate to the point that something new (or a fork that throws away a lot of compatibility with the existing kernel) will take over.
Crowding out OpenBSD Posted Nov 16, 2012 14:42 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] "Those who didn't learn from PentiumPro are doomed to Itanium"... The "baggage" of keeping old stuff running well is vital for the fledgeling operating system/architecture/whatever. If it isn't there, it won't ever make it to enough popularity to stand on its own. You'd be surprised at the proportion of shops still running ancient software, often on heroic life support measures. One of the funnier stories from IBM's early days was a machine running an emulator for an older model, under which an emulator for a still older machine ran, just to keep some program from the dawn of computing available. And I remember somewhere where they had a more than 15 year old PL/1 program, to which the source code had been long lost. Their most valuable asset was an old hand, who knew the innards of the code enough to be able to tweak it by patching the executable.
Crowding out OpenBSD Posted Nov 22, 2012 22:04 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
Indeed, I see this "We will succeed because we lack useless baggage" attitude all the time from little hobbyist systems. It's the same mistake as when someone observes that most MS Office users are using only a small fraction of its features and then mistakenly concludes that a program which implements a small fraction of MS Office's features is adequate for most MS Office users. It would only be true if they all sought the /same/ features but of course everybody is different.
It only takes _one_ missing requirement to rule out your system. It will take hundreds, even thousands of features to "bloat" the system enough to make a measurable difference.
Some people seem to have created a folk history of Linux in which Linus Torvalds slays the bloated dinosaurs of Traditional Unix with his simpler, lightweight OS. In reality from the outset people's gripe about Linux was that it lacked features they wanted, and that's where a lot of early development (and the occasional famous name) comes into the picture. Nobody was shouting "Hooray Linux doesn't have over-complicated PAM", they were shouting "Hooray Linux runs on these incredibly cheap i486 based PCs we got for half the price of an entry-level Sun clone, what a shame it doesn't have PAM, I wonder if we can fix that somehow".
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