There are many contenders to the desktop crown, and a relative newcomer in that area is Whitix, an operating system which, despite what the name suggests, is not based on Linux. It comes with a fully pre-emptive multitasking kernel as well as ports of GCC, Python, and Mono. A bugfix release has just been posted on the website.
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2005-07-06
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2005-07-13
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2009-02-02
I like that there's a variety of options out there.
Whitix looks like it has promise, and I like it's philosophy. The desktop looks like it's in it's infancy, but once they get the AMD/Nvidia drivers going, who knows what will happen!
Kudos to the developers, I think I'll be trying this out when I get home!
Member since:
2005-06-30
Thanks for all the comments so far. I'm about to release another bugfix release, 0.2b, that fixes several more issues. There's also a new (much faster) scheduler in development, so I can see another release happening for that!
Looking further into the future (next century 
), I'm currently experimenting with a 64-bit SMP kernel written in D (with support for in-kernel exception handling and garbage collection of userspace applications). A lot of D is similar to C, so it definitely won't be a kernel rewrite in any case. Expect to see a Git repository appear soon; I expect this will be the future of Whitix at some point.
I'll be starting a series of idea posts over at www.whitix.org/blog to motivate and inspire the growing community. I'll also be discussing the experimental kernel, and what role it might have in future development.
Edited 2009-02-11 19:22 UTC
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Actually, you got it backwards. Gobolinux uses symbolic links to maintain the old FHS compatibility, and the actual programs are installed to their Gobolinux paths. The old complexity is still there though, it's just the symbolic links that maintain that old complexity.
Member since:2005-06-30
It's not a general attitude about 64-bit (I'm actually writing an experimental 64-bit SMP kernel in D, as I've mentioned above). The thing is, back in 2005, Bochs' support for 64-bit machines, where I did most of my testing, was not good enough for me (IIRC). I may have been wrong though!
There will be a 64-bit Whitix eventually, just not too soon. (we'll see how things work out, especially with the community's growing size!)
Member since:
2005-11-10
Wow! And I thought Apple was the only company smart enough to know that on the desktop you don't need to see all the other stuff!
I can do system administration just a fine on my Mac as I can using Linux or Unix.
I hate trying to tell people things on Linux and trying to get them to understand. Well you need to go into /etc and then you need to go into /usr/bin
Bad enough trying to tell people to go to C:\Program Files etc, etc.
I don't know what happened to the gnome virtual file system. :-(
Member since:
2005-08-27
