Why New OSes Don't Catch On 350
mopslik writes "OSNews has an interesting editorial discussing why smaller operating systems will have a hard time gaining popularity. Familiarity, developer participation, and market saturation are listed as reasons for failure. Although the article focuses mainly on Syllable and SkyOS, I'm sure there are countless other operating systems to which these arguments apply."
The reason I haven't used them. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's about using getting stuff done... (Score:5, Interesting)
People still use the Atari ST (mainly the emulator version) to do music, because there are useful applications there.
For the most part, people really don't care what OS they are using, just as long as they can accomplish whatever tasks they need to do.
Functionality (Score:2, Interesting)
New systems today have a much high bar of functionality than the operating systems of yore - Office suite, drivers, games and compatibility.
Sadly, I think the boat for new operating systems has sailed.
Ignoring the obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
* Windows offers broad compatibility due to its dominant market share. You buy software or hardware off the shelf and can pretty much assume it will work.
* OS X offers (currently) freedom from viruses and trojans, the availability of mainstream software tools, and access to arguably superior creative software.
* Linux offers power and configurability; plus it appeals to many people philosophically.
Yes, I read the article; but please don't hold that against me.
Re:It's about using getting stuff done... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know how she did it.
Pining... (Score:3, Interesting)
Reading the various systems on oldcomputers.com, one realizes that it wasn't that long ago when nearly every new computer had its own OS. And each OS had its advantages and disadvantages and each one had a decent shot at becoming popular. The advocacy that sprouted up around each particular flavor du machine was always fun for a time.
Re:The reason I haven't used them. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm really curious as to what it was about BeOS that would make you want to part with your hard-earned money to buy a copy. Was there some feature of the OS that you felt made it worth the cash?
Define popularity? (Score:1, Interesting)
When they say "gain popularity", what do they really expect? Do they want a 30% userbase? If so, they're dreaming. I'm going to stick my neck out and say no new OS is going to make any dent in the Windows/Mac/Linux trio at the moment. Out of all of them, Linux will, naturally, take the bigger hit as it will be the Linux users (geek crowd) that are willing to try out the new OS.
Until a new OS has the resources and usability of Windows (yes, to most
Re:Getting Used to (Score:2, Interesting)
Some of us turn off
People are lazy (Score:5, Interesting)
People don't adopt new OSes because they are lazy, and learning a new OS takes work.
Seriously--my dad just bought a new iBook, after using 'doze all his life, and quit using it after just a few weeks because it was, in his words, "too much work" to learn the new system.
Re:Duh.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Now linux is in a position for a small number of converts from other OSes, but it needed the installed Unix user base to get to that point.
NicheOS's - Niche Hardware or Great Features? (Score:5, Interesting)
But why would I put a niche OS on PC hardware? Niche Linux distributions like MythTV, maybe, or LTSP lightweight distros designed to use old hardware as a thin client, or LiveCD OpenBSD firewall things or whatever.) Emulators for other hardware environments, maybe (one of the Psion development environments booted from PC MS-DOS mode, and I gather there are some gamer emulators that do similar things, and you used to need to run DOOM in MS-DOS instead of Windows to get native hardware access or something.)
Pen-based OS's were the last niche OS I saw that looked really interesting as a user - though they could just as well be a user interface on top of a full-featured operating system, and of course they choked and died and were replaced by PalmOS and Wince. QNX has always been somewhat interesting as hacker environment, because it's real-time, blazingly fast, and fits inside the Level 1 cache on your older CPU, though the last time I tried it it didn't have a driver for my Ethernet cards and was therefore pretty useless.
Any OS that wants me to spend time installing it had better have a lot of interesting features, or a few VERY interesting features, and it needs to run on a LiveCD (or floppy) on an older PC like a Pentium133 with 64MB RAM, because I'm not going to scrag my main machine to play with it. Neither of these includes a Reality Distortion Field, so their web pages need to actually say why they're interesting - and they don't. Syllable provides no obvious value - its web page says it's a fork off a 3-year-old PersonalEgoOS and doesn't say why it's more interesting than a well-supported OS. SkyOS looks like it has a screenshot tour and an 18MB AVI video tour, but it's too slashdotted to actually display those things, and screenshots might tell me why I want a new wallpaper or window manager but aren't the same as telling me what the OS *does* that's interesting - telling me that they'd like to offer a bounty for getting somebody to port OpenOffice just means they're running behind Linux and the BSDs - ZZZZ.
Ha. (Score:3, Interesting)
Lack of simple, shared application models.
If all a person needs is web-browsing, almost any os will do, but the point of a general-purpose computer is that its general purpose, and you can use it however you like. Simple app models become more specialized, and the network access anything anywhere model becomes the use linux for io or server app x, windows for gui app y, and maybe a mac for design/pub app z, cause those are the platforms specialized for each.
These are generalizations by the way, so the 50 people lining up to flame me can chill a sec. I have one of each machine running right now, and though I can do nearly everything on each of them, when it comes down to it sometimes I just need to switch over to one to get the job done. Try burning dvds the way you want (verified and with different formats) well without mac toast(or PIM stuff), or playing quickly with files on a network share without a set of linux terminals (never found a good term on a mac, and I hate winSMB, bleh), or watching funny(wmv/bad mp4) video encodes/playing games without windows.
Yes, I could probably use 1 system for all these things, but if I ever wanted to play games or prog VC++, Id need windows with a linux server, and well that just sucks, esp with 2 screens.
Its really the application holes that define OSs more than the functionality. A lack of MS Word(tm) is more likely to hold back Joe User from linux more than its incredible bounty of emacs plugins. On the other hand I gave my wife a mac mini, and never seen her so happy with a computer before.
Steve Jobs Said.. (Score:2, Interesting)
EROS-os and Plan 9, however, are cool! (Score:5, Interesting)
Both of these OS's were designed in a deep academic environment to be able to do really interesting things, and they're fundamentally different from just building Yet Another Unix-like thing with a window system on it (ok, Plan 9 did evolve from Unix, and does have an aggressively different window system, but it's not just random me-too-ism.)
It's called barrier to entry in economics (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The reason I haven't used them. (Score:5, Interesting)
I personally bought BeOS 4 after trying out the bootable demo cd that was available at the time.
When I loaded the demo I went from BIOS to full useability in under 20 seconds, so I thought that was pretty cool.
My BeOS machine was an extra computer at I had laying around. After a few weeks of using the OS and finding I could do mostly everything I did on my windows box(email,websurf,rip mp3s,listen to said mp3s with the wonderful soundplay) I decided to move the HDD into my main computer and dual boot windows and Be. For about a year I used BeOS a majority of the time.
I will admit there was one reason I never gave up Windows totally for Be...games. I liked a lot of the freeware games for Be, mostly puzzle games but none of the mainstream dev houses would port for it. I finally had to give up on Be after OS5 came out and they took more out than they put in. I think I enjoyed it most for the potential it had, probably the same reason I still have and Amiga 500 in a corner that still gets used.
Re:It's NOT the drivers, stupid! (Score:2, Interesting)
The big factor is how much a user can get done without touching a book. And as much as I use Linux, Windows is an easier beast. Macintosh is a simple machine to use, but I miss the right mouse button.
Here is the crux, if you can put a machine together that a novice can take a picture on their new digital camera, put a caption at the bottom, save it, and email it to a buddy, print it out on 3x5 photo paper, and then burn the album on a DVD, you have a winner.
By novice I mean someone who thinks that cut and paste is mind-blowing.
So it required hardware support, but try that on a linux box, your dealing with a ton of applications.. Windows has a freakload of things that are designed to make the dumb stuff easy. Once there is a machine that can do that, where my Dad isnt growling at the monitor, I'm there.
Storm
Two words: Terminal Emulation (Score:1, Interesting)
How can a hardware manufacturer use a new OS?
Example: Lots of computers, especially mobile computers, but also fixed terminals, are needed in business and industry to collect data and feed it to a central server. Large organizations have gazillions of lines of old code that works perfectly fine, and is designed to interface with something simple, like a VT100 or 5250. These legacy applications are going to be around for a long, long time.
Want to market a new OS? Start by writing terminal emulation software. This is not too difficult. Ideally, you write the OS to run efficiently on a low spec, bulletproof computer. Now you've got a market to sell thousands, or tens of thousands of inexpensive, durable computers and OS's.
Threre's a little company in Texas that makes, as in manufactures, computer in the USA. AML mobile computers run Linux, and come packaged with terminal emulation software. They are used to imitate dumb terminals so people can wirelessly collect data on the shop floor, or in a warehouse. AML also manufactures stationary terminals. These low tech devices are reasonably durable, and cost hundred less per unit than competing devices that have to pay the Windows tax.
The simple fact is that AML uses Linux because it's convenient. They could just as easily use something else, if it existed. All they need to do is port one application. The clients literally don't care what OS the devices run. So long as the device can pretend to be the appropriate flavor of dumb terminal, it's good enough. The less it costs, and the less frequently it breaks, the better.
What OS is the Blackberry running? It has 3 million users.
Java VM (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:react os (Score:1, Interesting)
Somebody please mod parent up. ReactOS is very cool. If it had government support from around the world MS would go bye bye real fast and we could all stop paying the MS tax.
Re:The reason I haven't used them. (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact I won version 4 of BeOS from some online contest. The problem with it was the oft repeated story of a great OS that has no apps and poor hw support. It was fun to play with, it ran fast, but over time I got tired of switching to windows when I wanted to print or scan something or view a webpage that used scripting, etc, etc.
Re:Duh.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Applications, Cost, Usable, Accessible, Versati (Score:3, Interesting)
IIRC, all computers at the time were basically like that - even Windows 3.11 computers. At best, you had a simple text editor and the other minimalistic software - everything else had to be purchased.
Actually, that was DOS. While W95 had a copy of basic on the CD, it is ineffective because of interpreter bugs (e.g. "ON ERROR RESUME NEXT" did not function wehn it should) and editor bugs (which gave an illusion of a line of code disappearing from your program.)
IF you needed to do anything serious, you needed to buy a C compiler. Even then, you still needed a hardware information since you required many low-level activities to do anything useful.
On the subject of car analogies... (Score:2, Interesting)
Not disputing your point, just modifying the analogy...
Re:Duh.... (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a real fine line between doing something that no one else is doing versus doing something because you don't like the way other people did it. I'd be open to switching my OS if a new OS did everything that my existing OS did *and* added a bunch of new stuff that made the effort worthwhile. My (admittedly limited) experience with alternative OS projects is that they're trying to solve problems that others have already solved. A new OS probably won't make that much of a difference to me.
This is usually the case, but some forks of existing code bases (consider dragonfly bsd [dragonflybsd.org]) are very talented developers who have ideas that can't possibly be worked into larger problems because of the disruption they would cause. DFBSD should be incorporating some "new" concepts that (as far as I can tell) aren't in ANY other OS. The other factors that came into play when the OS was started (much like the other BSD forks, the founder/leader was removed from an existing BSD project) seem to be mostly secondary to the technical goals.
Re:EROS-os and Plan 9, however, are cool! (Score:3, Interesting)
Plus, for $120 or so, I can have a UPS for any OS I want on a standard home PC, and get about the same thing.
Re:Duh.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Hell I remember running animated, scrolling wallpaper on a 486 6mb machine. You're right, in those days Linux was incredibly far ahead of anything else available. Windows closed the gap in recent years, though obviously it hasn't caught up.
Re:EROS-os and Plan 9, however, are cool! (Score:5, Interesting)
I first heard about Tandem from a friend. He saw them at a computer show in London. During the computer show, there was another show, the Ideal Home Exhibition, going on elsewhere in the same building. I guess there wasn't a whole lot of effective power conditioning going on in the building, because every time the sales droids in the Ideal Home expo cranked up washing machines, dishwashers and other power equipment, every computer at the computer show would crash. The sole exception being the Tandem booth - it just kept on trucking while everyone else was rebooting...
GM said thje same thing... (Score:5, Interesting)
This was in precisely the same year that Soichiro Honda, who only recently had started a company that mated washing machine motors to bicycle frames, showed his first car at the Tokyo motor show, its chain drive revealing its origins.
Talk about hubris!
Based on this, I would rather predict dozens if not hundreds of dominant OSes in the next hundred years or less.
Re:Duh.... (Score:3, Interesting)
"There's a real fine line between doing something that no one else is doing versus doing something because you don't like the way other people did it. I'd be open to switching my OS if a new OS did everything that my existing OS did *and* added a bunch of new stuff that made the effort worthwhile. My (admittedly limited) experience with alternative OS projects is that they're trying to solve problems that others have already solved. A new OS probably won't make that much of a difference to me."
Well, if you're using Windows right now, then you're in luck:
ReactOS.com [reactos.com]
ReactOS.net.tc - Application Compatibility List (incomplete) [reactos.net.tc]
Basically, ReactOS is a clone of Windows NT-based OSs (NT, Win2k, WinXP), and thus aims to provide full compatibility with virtually all applications and drivers currently available for these OSs.
Since it's released under the GPL, lots of interesting stuff can be done to it if someone is so inclined, including adding features many people want, but MSFT doesn't consider important enough to add.
The next big release (0.3.0) will finally make networking easy to use, as well as many other improvements. To give an idea of its capabilities, one can run Unreal Tournament hardware-accelerated with the standard, unpatched version of UT and the standard nVidia drivers.
Re:Duh.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Happily, the Linux Desktop developers are aware of this and are actively optimising everything all across the board, from Kernel to X to the desktop libraries to the DEs themselves.
GNOME and KDE will probably never run well on, say, 96MB of RAM, but at least the trend is to get faster and less memory-hungry - unlike the OS of a certain rival purveyor ;)
Re:Duh.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Once a FOSS operating system reaching the same usability level of the proprietary OSs then the OS marketplace will really change.
Why? Because once a FOSS OS takes off then there will be little or no compatibilty (read: migration) issues. People won't have to spend years trying to get to the same level of hardware support, etc. When this happens then the competition begins because people will actually have a CHOICE about what OS they use, because the foundation of the OS will be the same. Different OSs (basically distros) will be trying to develop innovative features to get more users. And, since they will be able to all base their OSs on a solid foundation that allows for compatibility, people will be much more easily sold. And the easier it is to switch, the more people have to compete.
Same logic goes for the cell phone companies with transferable phone numbers -- now they have to compete because they can't lock you in. (Though they try with the free phones that require 2-year agreements...)
Step by step (Score:4, Interesting)
It will take some time, but in small steps it is coming along.
The most important thing for the next 10 years is the adoption of the OASIS-format, which offers these advantages over .doc:
Let's not forget that Microsoft cannot bundle MSOffice with Windows because almost half of their revenue is generated by it and doing so would put them deeply into the red. They also can't lower the price too much for the same reasons.
So, yes it will take quite long (I'd say about 10 years) but OASIS will become the standard.
Removing the Windows desktop domination will be the next step.
Re:Java VM (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Good luck trying to have changed incorporated (Score:4, Interesting)
What I found greatly shocked me. Open source programmers are like politicians: once they are successful, they protect their position in every way possible, without hesitating to publically embarrass you in forums, even if you explain to them with a million arguments that their piece of code is wrong.
I had such an experience with a gaming programming library (it's name starts with A..., and the word is of Latin origin). The library's forums are basically 'run' by a few people in the same way that Mafia runs its business: if you want in, you have to kiss the boss' hand. If you don't, then every comment you make will be used against you, they will humiliate you in public, and you will be banned for just daring to disagree and present your arguments. There are a bunch of people playing the leaders, and all the rest follow with sheep mentality. Let me give you an example: one of the "leaders" posted a library add on for 2d parallax scrolling that run in 30 FPS; I took the code and made it run in over 70 FPS; instead of the community being happy that such a good piece of code existed, I was told to "play with the program" and "show my respect", otherwise I would be banned! After that (and lots of other things), I quitted not only participating in the forums but basically gave up any plans of offering work for the open source world. It is just so much hypocrisy around, that I now think (and you may laugh about it) that humanity is doomed to self destruction with such attitude.
By the way, that library has been in version 4 for quite a few years, with an API good enough for DOS but not for modern O/Ses like Windows or Linux. There was a try to modernize it, but version 5 died a painful death due to 'internal politics' (i.e. its developers all wanted the biggest share of the fame pie, so the project naturally died).
I too apologise for the bitterness, but I had to say it, because I consider it totally stupid for humanity to act like that. We can accomplish great things working together, but it seems noone wants them unless they are the protagonists.
Re:It's the drivers, stupid! (Score:2, Interesting)
Syllable and SkyOS have the potential be usable systems with a decent user and developer community, but Thom has jumped the gun by several years and declared us all dead before we've even started!
Re:Duh.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Why?
Because in these application spaces, well established standards preceded or were co-created with the applications: HTTP, HTML, XML, SMTP so no vendor lock, no user disincentive of fearing their choice of application will be unworkable or won't interoperate with other business users. What does posix or win32 mean to a user? Who smears the line between API and OS platform interface standards?
Where was that in TFA?