Today, the major “hobby” Operating Systems are AtheOS (which is currently stalled), MenuetOS and SkyOS. Without doubt, SkyOS is the one that moves with the faster pace. Since our interview back in October (and the subsequent Slashdoting), Robert Szeleney has put all his free time on the (270,000 lines of code) project. He wrote a media player, the documentation for SkyOS, more device drivers and applications, networking, SkyFS, the ability to boot from a CDRom and install on a native partition, speed optimizations, some basic Linux emulation (without having SkyOS to be a UNIX) and much more. Robert expects SkyOS 3.6 (binaries and source under the GPL) to be ready for public consumption in the next few weeks.
SkyOS Receives Major Enhancements
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Impressive, to say the least. Could be a viable alternative if there is a lot of interest.
I find it incredible to look at screenshots of this OS, and realize that only 4 people are primarily in charge of it’s development.
Wow.
Impressive, to say the least.
A part of me though would like to see the collective brains of all geeks in the world get together and focus on ONE OS, but that’s just me.
Cudos go to the SkyOS team! Good work!
-Chris Simmons,
Avid BeOS User.
[email protected]
Actually, it is only a single person behind SkyOS, Robert. The second guy, Indra, has contributed some code here and there, but not nearly as much as Robert – he mostly debugs. Christian just maintains the web site and Patrick wrote the NTFS driver.
Impressive but, is it my monitor or the fonts are not so good looking?
I firmly believe that the most important app an alternative OS could have is a working browser. If people can surf the web with it, the rest will come easy.
I’m slightly amused at the implication that AtheOS has stalled. Especially the link to 0reality. If you follow the link, you’ll actually see plenty of chat & announcements from 3rd party developers, so I don’t know what its supposed to mean. Anyway, SkyOS is certainly impressive work, and it’s been going on for a long time now. The problem seems to be that the fonts & icons that are used are, well, ugly, and that there do not appear to be any native development tools. Its a good peice of work, and the developer should be proud of his work, but its unlikely to be of any interest to anyone else, which is sad in a way.
Vanders-
Eugenia probley meant that Kurt is taking a break from coding AtheOS. In that sense, offical development on AtheOS has stalled.
While a lot of people seem to think there’s no value in projects like AtheOS and SkyOS, I think it’s fantastic. Too many people seem to think that Linux and *BSD seem to make up the end-all for free operating systems, that anything new is a waste, and that the time of these awesome coders should be spent “improving GNOME” or something similiarily silly. Kudos to Kurt, Robert and anyone else working towards knowledge or something personally useful.
>>Too many people seem to think that Linux and *BSD seem to make up the end-all for free operating systems, that anything new is
a waste . . . <<
The *nix word IMNSHO is “stalled”. I’ve been using Linux since Slackware ’96 and not only has not improved much, its got worse.
I remember when a modest PC would run an out-of-the-box Linux distro that would SMOKE Windows on speed/responsiveness. Now Windows (ANY VERSION) is 2x faster than any out-of-the-box *nix distro. All for the cost of a half functional “window manager/environment”. . .
Thank god for BeOS, eh? Hopefully the unsuspecting world will be taken by storm from one of these fabulous projects (or another that we’ve not heard of yet), and *nix can go back to obscurity and running mail servers it cold dark closets where it belongs.
>I remember when a modest PC would run an out-of-the-box >Linux distro that would SMOKE Windows on > >speed/responsiveness. Now Windows (ANY VERSION) is 2x >faster than any out-of- the-box *nix distro. All for the >cost of a half functional “window manager/environment”. .
try icewm.
>try icewm.
IceWM sucks. I truly do not like it. It is faster and leaner than the KDE/Gnome bloatware, but it just doesn’t feel good. Personally, I prefer WindowMaker. Is it really a coinsidence that the only fast *and* functional at the same time wm on Unix is inspired/copied from the ashes of a commercial research and company and not from random people in the open source world, half-implementing whatever they want with not GUI research on the backs?