Linked by Kroc Camen on Thu 5th Nov 2009 21:05 UTC
There's no right way to do it, only ideas that are better than others in certain situations. But if you had the opportunity to head up the design of a new OS, one to Put Things Right, one that could be radical enough to varnish out those UI/X bumps that have clung on for years, but practical enough to be used every day, what would you design? How would you handle application management? What about file types and compatibility? Where would you cherry pick the best bits from other OSes and where would you throw away tradition? I've tackled this challenge for myself and present (an unfinished idea): KrocOS (warning: HTML5 site, will display without CSS in IE/older browsers). OSnews Asks: What would make your perfect OS?
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Member since:
2005-11-02
It seems like I am forever repeating myself. Once more!
A stable ABI will kill the open source Linux kernel in short order (I'm betting on ~5 years). It will guarantee that in the future your drivers are closed source. Maybe you don't care, but I do and the kernel developers do.
X is not the problem. Replacing X doesn't solve any problems and introduces a slew of new ones. There are few good reasons to replace X and a large number of reasons not to replace X. I'd love to hear why you think X is an issue so I can see if you fall in to the 90% of the anti-X camp that just doesn't know what it's talking about.
OS X works as well as it does almost entirely because it is a single vendor system. Linux distributors could do exactly the same thing. It is not a technology issue! The fact is that distribution makers don't want to do that level of integration (or at least they don't do it) and Linux's users would punish them with their feet if they departed so radically from the status quo.
I had high hopes for Ubuntu once upon a time, but they fell in step (in the end) with every other distribution in any number of ways.
I will repeat it once more for the tl;dr crowd: If you want Linux OS X you can build it 99% out of existing software available for Linux right now. Form a company, build boxes with a specific set of hardware, build your distribution, use app bundles. It can work! Today. Without replacing X, or changing the kernel.
If you have a small enough target even the unstable binary ABI is not an issue. If vendors only need to target one new kernel per year (at most) then there is no problem.