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Crowding out OpenBSDCrowding out OpenBSDPosted Nov 14, 2012 9:13 UTC (Wed) by airlied (subscriber, #9104)In reply to: Crowding out OpenBSD by dlang Parent article: Crowding out OpenBSD
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.
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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.
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