NeoNerds.net have snagged an interview with the project manager of the Syllable project, Kristian “Vanders” Van Der Vliet. In this interview, NeoNerds reveals the current status of the project, as well as the projected future of Syllable as a desktop and office OS.
Interview with Syllable Project Manager “Vanders”
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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The whole interview is completely non-technical. Plus, around half of it is just a swipe at Linux.
All his gripes with Linux appear to center around the bloated-ness of distributions. If there’s no technical advantages at all worth mentioning, only this, it would seem to make more sense to just create his own distro rather than develop a whole new OS.
Oh, he mentions that Linux has “gaping holes” but then goes off on his bloated-ness tangent.
His plans for integration of the OS look impressive, but then let’s look at Linux: loads of plans, but the devil’s in actually carrying them out.
This interview is for the most part complete fluff. Good for a laugh though! My favourite part is this bit:
—
Interviewer: He He He, that’s been one of my main complaints against Linux; the open source community claim that it’s unbloated, but when you have to download 7CDs of a distribution, it’s a waste of your time and your life when you’re on Dialup
Kristian: Exactly. I don’t want to have to install five text editors when I only want one.
—
Note: Syllable itself looks fairly interesting, and its goals are certainly noble, but this interview shows it in a really poor light. I can’t imagine anyone being impressed.
Well, I clicked the interview link and this is what happened:
“Access to this website is currently not possible as your hostname/IP appears suspicous.”
Very nice… Wonder who else will get the same as I’m not a member of the KGB, Mafia or any other underground groups AFAIK.
“I can’t imagine anyone being impressed.”
Funny, that’s exactly what I NOW think of Linux, after using it as my ONLY OS for 5 (almost 6) years on the desktop. I still use it as a server though. And admittedly on only one of my desktops.
“it would seem to make more sense to just create his own distro rather than develop a whole new OS. ”
Yep, that’s exactly what we need: YADLD (Yet Another Damn Linux Distribution) Which in part is what causes problems for it…and don’t give me that “choices” speech…remember I USED to be a Linux zealot, I wrote that speech.
I think Syllable has potential, it just needs time and developers.
What a joke!
Obviously you didn’t even read my comment.
“I think Syllable has potential, it just needs time and developers.”
Yes, I agree. Go back and *read* what I wrote this time. The last paragraph in particular.
“”I can’t imagine anyone being impressed.”” [/me snips gratuitous Linux bashing]
Once again, I was talking about the *interview*, not about Syllable OS. I actually made this clear throughout and stated it explicitly in my last paragraph. But then, you’d’ve had to have actually read my comment to spot that.
“Yep, that’s exactly what we need: YADLD (Yet Another Damn Linux Distribution)”
/sarcasm/ Yes, so we’d best have Yet Another Damn OS instead, then, eh? Then we can re-write *everything* from scratch, and really go for mass duplication of effort.
Great logic there, Brad. Sheesh.
Seriously, I’m sure Syllable has lots of technical merits. It’s just a pity that the lead developer didn’t bother to mention a single one of them in his interview. Once again: I am criticising the interview only, not the OS.
The purpose of the interview wasn’t to give a technical readout of the OS; the purpose was to provide a look into the… “political”, perhaps, future of the OS.
It was written so that potential users could see where their OS would be, in terms of a central USAGE base – not how many framebuffer devices it has, but how it can help people do their jobs, and actually use their computers rather than playing with them.
Linux already fills the hole in the market for people who want to mess about with a command line; Syllable is designed to be used, and be free in the process.
THAT was the point of the article. Not to bash Linux, and not to impress anybody.
I hope that more interviews are conducted with the Syllable development team. I have long been a fan of BeOS, and hopeful for revival of its merits in some form. Syllable is very similar in its user-centered spirit to BeOS, and development seems to be well ahead of the BeOS-related efforts. Any publicity given to Syllable should help to increase awareness, and hopefully boost developer contribution. Thanks for the interview, BOFH.
Vanders, if you are reading, I’m glad you picked up the Atheos torch. I had been following Atheos with much interest after Be died out, and was sad to see its development stalled. Keep up the good work!
Any Nonmouse
Pretty interesting and it took quite a bit of work to get together it looks like.
Syntaxis : The interview really was not intended to be a technical overview of Syllable. If you want one, feel free to send an email to the mailing list with your questions and we’ll try to answer them. As for the Linux bashing, well that really is how I feel about Linux. You’d think after 6 years of using it, I’d be comfortable with it by now wouldn’t you? Sadly not; there are too many “gotchas” and rough edges to snag yourself on. More Linux distributions arn’t going to solve it, either.
Any Nonmouse : Thanks. Its not just me though, everyone has put in a lot of work on Syllable over the past year! I’m glad you find Syllable interesting.
Linux already fills the hole in the market for people who want to mess about with a command line; Syllable is designed to be used, and be free in the process.
THAT was the point of the article. Not to bash Linux
There isn’t quite a difference. GNU was designed from the ground up to be used and to be simple. Yes it wasn’t designed to be used without a commandline at first, but that’s because when it was started, that was the status quo. Today, GNOME or KDE are making huge steps towards usability and simplicity and especially getting rid of the command line requirement (without removing it).
Today, the main advantage of Syllable that I can see is, that it’s unbloated, small and fast (bootup and such), but rather lacking in usability and everything else. :/
Claims that rewriting the OS will lead to better results sooner are mostly just populistic. Just like the idea that rewriting the browser (Mozilla) instead of improving it would lead to quicker results always was very popular… before it actually got improved that is…
I don’t want to have a go at AtheOS or Syllable which is a very cool project in it’s own right, and I, too, once believed that it would be the future for free software on the desktop, but I also would agree with Syntaxis in most points… Vanders continued Linux bashing doesn’t make this project look very good in my eyes, because I don’t think it’s realistic anymore (besides of that I think Vanders is a cool guy, don’t get me wrong).
if you’re browsing a website like OSnews, you’re not the average person
The examples of KDE’s ‘good design’ are visually pretty but bog awful for the average user… Programmers & the like live in a different world when it comes to perceiving computers. What looks an easy interface for the average programmer, is always full of faults
Anyone that thinks KDE is not bloated and is actually usefull needs to consult a physician and a psychiatrist ASAP. That thing is more bloated and less user friendly & intuitive than windows.
Uhmm, from what we all see, neither Linux nor Syllabe is top notch now.
Linux is pretty good for server, I must agree, but as a workstation… Lot of rough edge(like the bloat, the configuration way and so on) that refrain me to use everday(with the fact that I need Painter and Photoshop).
Syllabe/AtheOS lack of application and is only at his beginning. I take nearly 10 year for Linux to arrive where he is so don’t be in a hurry
.
But why no one is doing what Apple are done for MacOS X? Isn’t it possible to create a new OS with what exist now(and work) so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel?
To follow the way of Apple : we took FreeBSD, we rip off what are unneeded, we create an interface for it, we nearly suppress the need for command line(is it so hard to write some frontend to configure Apache? I don’t think so), we give it a nice installation procedure, an understandable way to install application and in the end we have an OS that support plenty of driver, is rock solid, open source, fast and easy to use for the normal user.
I don’t think the future is the command line. Command line is usefull to correct error on a computer where we don’t have access. It’s not usefull for me to launch a game, to play an mp3, to install the driver of my new graphic card.
So… long live to Syllabe and other project like that!
Linux has two big usability issues:
GUIs for configuring Linux
Red Hat’s GUI tools are simple and straightforward to use, but aren’t comprehensive enough for a CLI to not be necessary. SuSE’s YaST2 is very comprehensive, but cumbersome, and even has some features that belong in the Interface Hall of Shame, such as the “checkboxes” in YaST’s RPM manager, where clicking on the checkbox cycles through about five mini-icons instead of just checking/unchecking the box. Mandrake’s GUI tools are probably the most comprehensive but lack some polish.
A user-space that differs widely from distro to distro
There is no cross-distro standard for startup scripts, which means that any apps that require them also require the user to mess with the CLI to handle startup. Different compilers, glibc versions, etc. make it tricky for Linux binaries, especially RPMS, to work across multiple platforms. The LSB handles some of this, but not enough as of yet.
====
Syllable has the advantage of being GUI-based from the start and thus avoiding these issues. The catch is that Linux has more momentum, drivers, and applications.
That is in fact what RedHat is doing.
Certainly not as fast as Apple (well, they don’t have THAT many millions after all), not using propriatory software and not sacrificing interoperability with existing Linux/Unix software (in fact, they are trying to improve it).
You could argue that RedHat should cut off many “duplicated” software like KDE or some of those many text editors on the CD’s. But then again, none of these is ever installed if you install a standard system, so I don’t see why it matters.
They even have some frontend to configure Apache btw.
Yes, an OS that *requires* you to use command line tools is as bad as an OS that can only be fully configured with a GUI.
I found the Mandrake tools to be very slow and unreliable, they lack the integration with the OS compared to when they are written as part of the OS, rather than an addon.
A simple modular set of tools, as clean as the command line ones and standard across distros would be ideal.
At the moment all distros use different ones…
I can see the argument for many different text editors and web browsers, but we only have one command line ifconfig, so why are there so many different gui net config tools?
Sometimes choice is a bad thing.
The reason you sometimes need to use the command line to configure things in Linux is mostly a matter of manpower and resources. Which would you rather have:
a) No feature
b) Feature but accessible via the command line only
c) Feature but accessible via the CLI or a nice GUI
Most people would choose (c), but surprise, that’s also the largest amount of work.
And in fact, it seems that Syllable is already using large amounts of stuff originally developed for Linux, artwork, GTK, not to mention other bits of free software like KHTML or Gecko.
So, he says “YALD won’t solve that”, but apparently if you rewrite the kernel and graphics layer then you don’t have these problems. I don’t understand how it’s less work to simply fill the holes in Linux than it is to reinvent everything from scratch (and yes, it is possible to make radical changes).
Don’t get me wrong, if he’s doing this just to have fun fine, but the interview made it sound like it was actually meant to be a serious replacement for Linux one day.
I have to question the wisdom of that when it’d be easier to, for example, improve XFrees auto configuration (a stated goal of the team) and help them add features. Then we all benefit, even those of us with stupid graphics cards that only have binary drivers.
A simple modular set of tools, as clean as the command line ones and standard across distros would be ideal.
Like these?
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gst/index.html
Also Mike Hearn just expressed my feelings perfectly (again :/), they don’t use Gtk though but have their own toolkit.
I have to question the wisdom of that when it’d be easier to, for example, improve XFrees auto configuration (a stated goal of the team) and help them add features.
You don’t seem to get it… X11 and everything that builds on top of it are the weakest links in the Linux development chain. The inclusion of XFree86 in every single Linux distro is what has damaged it the most – only OSes like QNX and MacOS X, where they’ve abolished X11, can actually been successful in the desktop and consumer worlds.
It really is sometimes quite difficult to explain why we don’t use Linux. While there are technical merits to the Syllable kernel, I wouldn’t claim that it is technically superior to Linux
The real reason is that in order to create a really tightly integrated Operating System, you have to have control over the entire codebase. All the way from the kernel to the applications. We cannot do that with Linux. Note that Apple did not simply take a snapshot of E.g. FreeBSD and build on top of that; they produced their own kernel, drawing on various sources to do so. I’ve also not heard any complaints that Apple did not use X! Apparently that would have been the logical choice for them; take a BSD kernel & userland, add XFree86 and then write a toolkit on top of it. For some reason they chose not to. I wonder why?
The absolute biggest problem with Linux is that there is no such thing as “The Linux Operating System”. There are many Operating Systems that are built with Linux, GNU, XFree86 and various other applications, and they’re all different. This is partly because there is no single entity that defines what “The Linux Operating System” is. Syllable completly avoids that by simple not being Linux, and having control over the entire codebase from top to bottom.
So yes, we could spend our time patching Linux, or XFree86 or whatever, but there still would not be a “Linux Operating System”. Heck, I could spend my time trying to get Gnome & KDE to work together on a single codebase. Maybe after that miracle I could try to cure cancer and solve world hunger.
There are huge psychological and practical reasons for not using Linux. Those are some of them.
BOFH… You should be careful with sentences like “you don’t seem to get it” on such a touchy and controversial point.
Nobody is arguing that X isn’t the fastest and most featureful display engine, but it’s still very powerful, the most powerful we have. If someone else is going to rewrite and provide something better, fine, go on. Many are trying this already but you can’t just say a Linux OS without XFree would be better. It wouldn’t, it would be crippled. There is no free display system that even rivals XFree, even if you don’t take compatibility into account. OTOH, XFree can and will be improved, see 3D acceleration, see fonts, see mouse cursor, see resolution changing on the fly, etc. The same will happen to issues like the configuration (fallbacks) and real 2D transparency (maybe a composited desktop).
Apple can write their own because they can and they would be foolish not to do because they are living from beeing different (think different). They have no interest in merely improving free software.
But can we? If yes, why haven’t we? There is no need to write a new OS just to show that you can write a better display engine. Just do it if it’s so easy.
So yes, we could spend our time patching Linux, or XFree86 or whatever, but there still would not be a “Linux Operating System”.
But you know that you could take any part from the GNU operating system and still call the result “Syllable”. You could break compatibility all the way if you want to, especially if you are doing it anyway by writing a new OS.
I understand your point about controlling the code of all the parts at once and not having to support competing projects (killing choice in favor of simplicity), but that’s really the only valid point I can understand. And it would still not explain why you couldn’t use a fork of another project as a base for your uncompatible version (besides beeing much less fun).
But you know that you could take any part from the GNU operating system and still call the result “Syllable”
You do realise that this is exactly what we do? We use the GNU toolchain all the way with GCC, Glibc, Binutils etc. and mostly GNU userland with Bash, Shellutils, Fileutils etc. Whe have our own kernel, our own graphic server and our own GUI toolkit. Syllable is POSIX.1 and largely POSIX.2 complient, but also has its own unique API’s that you can choose to use. In other words, you can break compatability when you want to
it would still not explain why you couldn’t use a fork of another project as a base for your uncompatible version
There are technical reasons, psycological reasons and Syllable is a fork of AtheOS and that is what we have inherited. The important parts do tend to come from other sources such as Linux. Take a look at the soundcard or NIC drivers for example; they are almost all totally ported from Linux.
Now if Syllable was starting off with a blank sheet, I would not write our own kernel from scratch. The fact though is that the Syllable kernel is largely complete now, and the work that would be required to change the kernel outways the work that would be required to complete the Syllable kernel. Remember, for Syllable 1.0 we are not aiming for the super bleeding edge technological super-kernel, just something that works and does everything we need.
Apart from all the psychological reasons, I’m always amazed at the number of people that don’t see that you can’t simply morph one software system into another. The only explanation I see for this is that most commenters are simply not experienced software engineers.
There is simply no practical way to succeed in designing the operating system of your dreams and then saying: “O, I’ll take Linux because it happens to be there and refactor it until it is what I designed.” They’re much too different and there are far too many details that will cripple this approach.
What we can do is make our design, see of what parts it consists, and evaluate the open-source field to find existing parts that meet our specifications well enough to use or adapt them. This is what Kurt did with AtheOS, and this is what we are continuing to do with Syllable.
Will we use parts from wherever we can lay our dirty hands on? You bet! Will we reject parts that happen to be some people’s favorite because it doesn’t fit the grand design? That, too. 🙂 Will we have trouble overthrowing Windows and Linux because we’re not 100% compatible? Probably. Will we produce a great system that can be useful to many people? We already have!
Face it: we have a full, functional operating system. We’re not a company, that can go out of business. Syllable is useful in some situations right now. Our functionality will only improve over time. The only way is up.
Also, don’t forget that since Syllable is a small community, there’s greater control over the codebase than with, say, Linux. The majority of Syllable apps are produced by a small group of people, whereas with Linux thousands of developers are working on it – each with different coding practices and styles.
Because of this, “bad” bits of code can slip through into the Linux codebase; with Syllable, this isn’t as likely to happen, as sub-standard coding can easily be rejected. That’s why OSes like Mac OS X and Windows have been much more commercially successful than Linux.
I think we all agree on some thing :
Xfree86 is not that great. But it has a lot of driver and work.
Linux is becoming bloated. Full of app, but too full of them.
There’s no standard in the Linux world for deskstop. Erhmm, no standard for a lot of thing(no common repertory structure as I’ve seen hey!)
So we have two alternative :
-take back some existing projet(like FreeBSD, Linux) and improve it where it’s interesting and throw away the rest and create that better. Can save some time… but can give some headache to find why it work this way and not another. And yeah, Apple has fork his own BSD know as darwin. Vanders, it’s open source(much less restrictive than bsd though), and you can get it on http://www.darwin.org.
-create a whole new OS, make it’s design completely from ground up. Advantage : you know your code, you have design it so it work the way YOU want and you can improve from the base what you want. The badside… you don’t have many driver support since you must write it
.
Apple hasn’t the driver problem as us : company that want to be usable on mac must devellop driver themselve, and Apple know perfectly(at least I hope) their hardware.
Well. No one want to make a fork of FreeBSD? (Dunno why, I prefer FreeBSD over Linux :p)
As I understand it, Apple ported XFree86 to their graphics/widowing system Quartz/Carbon. So BOFH’s claim that they abolished X11 isn’t accurate. It’s good to have that kind of upgrade path. Jean-Baptiste Quéru was right to point out the importance of that in his interview.
“- the contender needs to have benefits over the established standard.
– the migration path must be clear, painless, and must include a path back.
– interoperability with the established standard must be perfect. ”
That is also why I think AMD’s Opteron will do well in the market, and may really hurt Intel’s plans for its Itanium processors. Intel may be able to make the migration/interoperability process smooth enough that Itanium’s benefits outweigh any bumps in that process.
Linus once said (sorry, no reference) that WINE was one of the most important projects he knew of, and I believe he said it for the same reasons.
The developers of Syllable may want to consider porting XFree86 to their OS too. Of course, fully integrated native apps will always be best; but the migration path is important in order to attract enough users and gain critical momentum.
The Inferno OS http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/index.html has a very interesting way of providing a migration path.
You can run it on top of other OSes, even as an Internet Explorer plugin.
I know about Darwin, thanks Sabastien. But my point was that Darwin is not a seperate version of BSD that Apple controls themselves; they do not import the latest version of FreeBSD for every new version of OS X.
As for driver support, Syllable actually does pretty well in that regard. When you consider the number of active developers and then look at the supported hardware, its pretty impressive. No other small “hobby” OS comes close. This is mostly because we generally port Linux drivers, and they require few changes to get them running in Syllable. There are sometimes issues with that, but mostly they work, and they work with few changes. It is still a disadvantges (The drivers still need to be ported, and sometimes it can be tricky to port them), but less of a problem than you may think
You do realise that this is exactly what we do?
Yeah, you just rewrite those “tiny” details like the kernel, the graphics layer, the GUI and the entire desktop environment.
There are technical reasons, psycological reasons and Syllable is a fork of AtheOS and that is what we have inherited.
I know. But I also know that Kurt Skauen always stressed that he did what he did for the fun of it, until he always lied when I was around. It makes sense to rewrite something if you do it for fun and your own use and it’s absolutely stunning what Kurt produced out of nothing.
The fact though is that the Syllable kernel is largely complete now, and the work that would be required to change the kernel outways the work that would be required to complete the Syllable kernel. Remember, for Syllable 1.0 we are not aiming for the super bleeding edge technological super-kernel, just something that works and does everything we need.
Yeah… And I hope you succeed. But that doesn’t change my opinion that it’s absolutely unrealistic to claim that it’s a better solution in general (or will be anytime soon) for “users” (those who just want it to work) than RedHat and co. Even if you ignore driver and application support.
“The developers of Syllable may want to consider porting XFree86 to their OS too. Of course, fully integrated native apps will always be best; but the migration path is important in order to attract enough users and gain critical momentum.”
It might make more sense to try to port Qt and GTK+ to Syllable rather than X itself. Not only are those two toolkits fairly popular, but neither of them are particularly married to X, and it should be possible to have the Syllable versions of Qt and GTK+ retain the Syllable look and feel.
My guess is that the main reason Apple did not use X as its primary display server is that it would mean that vendors porting Unix apps for OS X, instead of using Apple’s preferred GUI APIs, would take the path of least resistance and take whatever X toolkits they were using and use them on OS X, so the ported apps would not have the Apple look and feel. By making X apps “second-class citizens” on OS X, Apple encourages ports to Carbon and Cocoa.
Vanders : eh eh, of course, if they import each modification of the freeBSD in Darwin they’re going to be mad in less than 2 week
But I think a practical fork is possible, the way like Apple has done.
For MacOS X and Xfree for what i’ve understood it’s a rootless server – so the application is still in the Mac OS X graphical environment… just another way to port apps easily. I think it’s the way to go
For Wine, sure it’s a way to use Linux, but it’s not practical. True Linux apps is way better, if you’re going to a real other choice, you must have really new apps with it. If it’s to use old app, use old OS
My guess is that the main reason Apple did not use X as its primary display server is that it would mean that vendors porting Unix apps for OS X, instead of using Apple’s preferred GUI APIs, would take the path of least resistance and take whatever X toolkits they were using and use them on OS X, so the ported apps would not have the Apple look and feel. By making X apps “second-class citizens” on OS X, Apple encourages ports to Carbon and Cocoa.
Bingo
You win the star prize!
It might make more sense to try to port Qt and GTK+ to Syllable..
You’ve already answered that with your insight into Apple above. We will discourage full ports of Qt and GTK+ to Syllable for exactly the same reasons.
Well, good luck with the highly-integrated, lean, no-bloat approach. As I said before, it’s a noble goal, and I really do mean that.
Unfortunately, as Syllable accumulates more developers, this attitude is *bound* to lead to forks. Just like you forked AtheOS because you were pissed off at the lead developer’s attitude and thought you could do a better job yourself, I would imagine that a growing community with various different schools of thought will want to diverge away from your “one true path”. In other words, people are going to disagree with you. It’s inevitable. If nothing else, there are always conflicts of personality. And when they do, it sounds to me like their only solution is going to be to start their own forked project, since there will be no place for two ways of doing more or less the same thing within Syllable. As you say in the interview, we don’t want five text editors, right? Would even *two* be too many for you, in your quest for uber-integration? Sounds like the classic Highlander complex: “THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!!!”
I could possibly be persuaded by the argument that too much choice can sometimes be a bad thing, and that some of the Linux distributions may err in this respect, but your approach looks in serious danger of becoming rather like the other extreme to me.
People can try to make things black-and-white all they want.
Syllable is not Linux. The developers working on Syllable do so because they agree with the original design decisions Kurt Skauen made in AtheOS. One of those principles is to strike a balance between new design and using existing open-source parts.
It’s becoming clear to me that Syllable is becoming successful very fast now: Linux users actually seem to feel threatened by it. 🙂 I see people here reasoning like: “O, if it’s a hobby project, you can do what you like. But, hey, your project leader seemed to insinuate that you aim to become successful. Successful, that must mean replacing Linux. But, hey, that’s impossible. No, instead, if you want to become successful, you should become Linux!”
Just like you forked AtheOS because you were pissed off at the lead developer’s attitude and thought you could do a better job yourself
Actually, that is not why I forked AtheOS. If Kurt had continued to work on AtheOS I would not have forked and I would still be happy to let Kurt work on the codebase alone. At the point where I forked Syllable AtheOS had not been updated in nearly nine months. Most people would consider that a stagnent or even dead project.
You miss the point behind Syllable. It is not simply a case of “ONE TRUE WAY!” (Said in a loud, booming voice) and thats that; it is a case of trying to do things the best way once, or if you can’t do it one way, do it wtih sensible defaults. Frankly if the end user wants 74 text editors installed all at once, they’re welcome to do so. We project packages of various text editors for download, including Vim & Emacs. Yet we only install AEdit as the default. If its not good enough for your needs, you can install a different one. Would two be too many? If they were both installed by default, yes.
If you want to talk about Syllable as though it is a Linux distribution, go right ahead. Just don’t be surprised if the arguments on both sides make no sense in that context.
“It might make more sense to try to port Qt and GTK+ to Syllable..”
You’ve already answered that with your insight into Apple above. We will discourage full ports of Qt and GTK+ to Syllable for exactly the same reasons.
Yet Qt is available for Mac OS X and it has the Apple look and feel. There is also a port of GTK+ 1.x to Cocoa, and it too (AFAIK) has the Apple look and feel. Heck, even without third-party toolkits, Apple has two APIs, and both have nigh the same look and feel.
Porting toolkits to Syllable would not bring the same problems that porting X itself would.
It’s becoming clear to me that Syllable is becoming successful very fast now: Linux users actually seem to feel threatened by it. 🙂
This statement is rather arrogant.
Beeing an Open Source supporter, I can definitely not be threatened by another Open Source OS. In fact, if I would still believe that it would be the better approach, I would support you as much as I can.
What itches me is the amount of mud you guys throw at Linux, mostly just going for the popular (I’m not going to say FUD) statements. It makes me lose my respect for Syllable and I really had a lot of respect for AtheOS and Kurt Skauen. :/
“If you want to talk about Syllable as though it is a Linux distribution, go right ahead.”
Er, where did I say that? You must be confusing me with somebody else. Besides, you yourself make numerous comparisons between Linux and Syllable in your *own interview*, so I hardly think you can criticise anyone else for doing the same!
Okay. 🙂 I think sane defaults are a great idea. Though I still think you’d need to install both Vi and Emacs by default, since they’re so staggeringly different from each other. But you’re planning to go beyond that; you’re planning to *actively discourage* the porting of Qt and GTK+ to Syllable, for example. You want one widget set, full stop, you don’t just want a nice one by default.
But seeing as a large chunk of your impetus for working on Syllable seems to come from the bloated-ness and user-unfriendliness of Linux default installs (judging from the interview) it would seem to be rather more logical to just *fix the install* and maintain your own tweaked distro rather than write a whole new OS from scratch.
Instead of addressing specific issues which you’ve identified, you’ve instead chosen to go back and re-invent absolutely everything from the ground up. I’m personally not the least bit convinced that this is necessary, rather than the gradual evolution and improvement constantly taking place.
Still, best of luck.
Well hang on a minute, my comments about Linux are based on 6 years of using it as my primary desktop system. I was using Redhat 5.2, when KDE was new and you had to write your own chat scripts to get PPP working. Since when did negative criticism based on experience become mud slinging? I don’t like Linux. I like it more than I like Windows, but thats not saying much based on personal bias. I think Linux has lots of problems, both technically and in the attitudes of its developers and users. I may have generalised in this interview, and I may only have touched upon some specific points (It was only a limited interview, after all), but they are criticisms based on valid experiences with Linux. I honestly do not understand how that is mud slinging?
“I honestly do not understand how that is mud slinging?”
It’s not. Don’t worry about it.
Your point of view is perfectly valid, albeit possibly overgeneralising just a tad. “Linux” is a rather broad term, after all. And “gaping holes” is a rather incendiary choice of words to use without then backing it it up except for railing on about a surfeit of choice and lack of sane defaults… 😀
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“It’s becoming clear to me that Syllable is becoming successful very fast now: Linux users actually seem to feel threatened by it. :-)”
This statement is rather arrogant.
Beeing an Open Source supporter, I can definitely not be threatened by another Open Source OS. In fact, if I would still believe that it would be the better approach, I would support you as much as I can.
What itches me is the amount of mud you guys throw at Linux, mostly just going for the popular (I’m not going to say FUD) statements. It makes me lose my respect for Syllable and I really had a lot of respect for AtheOS and Kurt Skauen. :/
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In case you missed it, the smiley indicated that my previous post was meant to be ironic. I can see how you would perceive it as arrogant if you take it seriously.
What bothers me about this discussion is that some Linux users seem to want to turn a perfectly reasonable interview into a black-and-white thing of Syllable versus Linux. We’re not trying to sling mud at Linux – that would be rather curious, given that we’re using significant portions of Linux code, and a number of Syllable developers are seasoned Linux users. We’re not claiming that we’re better in many respects, just in some respects that we care about. We’re not claiming that we’re going to take the world or that we’re a suitable replacement for Linux right now, just that we are working on something worthwhile. And I, personally, would like to do that work without being told that I’m doing it the wrong way because I’m not doing it the way Linux does.
People are talking about the importance of choice. Well, my choice is to do something different than Linux. Not for the sake of difference, but because I don’t believe that Linux should be the measure of OS development, and there are plenty of other measures out there if you care to look.
I would like to finish with a Chinese saying:
“Person who say it cannot be done should not interrupt person doing it.”
I don’t see how the amount of your experience has anything to do with whether this is mud slinging or not. I don’t claim that you didn’t have the problems you describe and I don’t claim that there aren’t still problems. But problems can be solved and developer attitutes can change.
Ok, that sounds much better.
By no means I would intend to stop you doing what you do. Nobody knows what the future will bring and nobody should claim to know.
Diversity is very good, but we shouldn’t trashtalk other projects even if we disagree with their way to do things, especially when those are free projects…
I guess I felt a bit defensive, because I actually think we have a very open-minded and diverse team with historical insight, which I’m very glad about.
Actually, I have been evaluating Linux distros, the BSDs and many other projects for years, and I keep doing that. It doesn’t mean I use all of them or agree with all their design decisions, but each of them exists for a reason, which is usually a set of ideas worthy of taking inspiration from. It’s just that throwing all those ideas on a heap doesn’t yield a consistent system, so we have to be selective. And we must be practical, too, because we can’t hope to finish a complete system and interoperate with other systems if we want to be 100% perfect.
I don’t think we will ever object to anyone who wants to bring cool projects to Syllable. Just don’t expect us to include them in the base system, Syllable proper, if they don’t fit the design.
You wouldn’t expect Microsoft or Apple to include Virtual PC as part of the base install for their OSes, would you?
You wouldn’t expect Microsoft or Apple to include Virtual PC
OTOH, MS or Apple aren’t above emulating other OS’s, when it suits them. MS had OS2 and POSIX subsytems for application compatibility until recently, not to mention the VDM and WOW subsystems. in fact, during the early days of Windows 95(and to some extent, NT), being able to run non-native applications was critical to convert users to the new platforms. Apple, also did this with OSX. of course, if you look at the death throws of BeOS and OS/2, it would seem that X11 ports are an act of desperation.
there were some comments about why Apple didn’t use FreeBSD+X11. the main answer to those are that Apple bought a complete OS, so why waste it? it’s not like they were designing from scratch, so what they chose doesn’t really have any bearing. doesn’t matter, because they wouldn’t have used X, anyway.
the last thing was that Linux is in competition with Syllable, or the other way around. nothing to worry about there, cause they’re different markets. Syllable has a far harder path to tread for popularity than Linux did. Linux was born out of the need for a cheap x86 Unix. Openserver, Unixware, a few smaller distributors and Minix(there was another unix like OS, the name slips my mind) weren’t much competition. Syllable is in a different market, where there’s quite a few OSes that are proven on the desktop with tons of applications. Linux is the fringe of the desktop market, even now.
you guys aren’t doing bad work, but Syllable has a long way to go. I hope you get more hands, because it really doesn’t seem like a lot has changed since Atheos was first released, and even less since Syllable took over.
wish you luck.
Now those are some valid remarks.
Yes, Syllable needs to provide some migration path. Currently, that’s POSIX and Ncurses. We’re already getting a lot out of that. Basically, it allows us a wide choice from existing open-source parts if we need a certain functionality. There are many more possibilities in the future, including emulators and native applications interfacing through standard network protocols.
And yes, Syllable is aiming for a more specific usage than Linux: the desktop. Although both Linux and Unix were created for the desktop, sort of, they have spent most of their lives as server OSes. I like Linux as a server, and I think it was only fair to expect that it would not be an optimal desktop solution. I agree that it will be hard for Syllable to compete with other desktop OSes, but on the other hand, that market is huge and currently lacks proper choice, so it should at least be possible to find a niche there. And as I said before, the only way is up.
Regarding progress, it depends on how you look at it. We’re dealing with the 80/20 rule here: Kurt Skauen left us with 80% of the design, but the remaining 20% takes 80% of the time. So from afar, the system may seem relatively unchanged, but a lot of details were worked out. An important thing is that we’re scaling up the development process. If you look at Kurt’s work, it’s amazing how efficient he was. He never seemed to bother with work that was not strictly necessary, in favor of pushing the important parts. That suited him well, but running the project with a wider developer base requires more infrastructure and more details to be worked out. I think that’s an important part of what we’ve been doing the past year. I also think it was a good time for it, because the base design was laid out and is guiding us now.
In general, many things that should be done or could be done have not been done yet simply because of limited development time. Anyone who thinks he or she has a good idea for Syllable is hereby invited to implement it.