this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
152 points (93.7% liked)
linuxmemes
21291 readers
1260 users here now
Hint: :q!
Sister communities:
- LemmyMemes: Memes
- LemmyShitpost: Anything and everything goes.
- RISA: Star Trek memes and shitposts
Community rules (click to expand)
1. Follow the site-wide rules
- Instance-wide TOS: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
- Lemmy code of conduct: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html
2. Be civil
- Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
- Do not harrass or attack members of the community for any reason.
- Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
- Bigotry will not be tolerated.
- These rules are somewhat loosened when the subject is a public figure. Still, do not attack their person or incite harrassment.
3. Post Linux-related content
- Including Unix and BSD.
- Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of
sudoin Windows. - No porn. Even if you watch it on a Linux machine.
4. No recent reposts
- Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't fork-bomb your computer.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Thinking about it, it's weird that there hasn't been any real change in operating systems for about 50 years. Unix and its derivatives seem to be almost the only game in town, apart from desktops running Windows.
It's because you don't want to reinvent the wheel all the time. It sucks doing it. Lots of effort. It's much better to build on existing stuff and maybe improve it for your needs.
But that's the thing: is there only one wheel? Maybe wheels are a bad metaphor here, but isn't it weird, that there aren't any fundamentally new concepts? Unix was developed basically during the preschool years of computing and we all just kind of stuck with its concepts.
If the underlying concept is good and was well thought out, it's better to build upon it instead of reinventing it.
Look at the 4 stroke engine (and engines in general) many of the design concepts date back to the 1880s!
There's other engine designs (ex:rotary engine) but the 4 stroke has over a century of testing, improvements, and refinements. A new design can adapt some of the refinements, but would have to catch up on decades of innovation and testing just to catch up!
On the Unix side, there's the evolution of the Posix standard (which was based on Unix).
I would point out, by comparison, that piston engines are effectively obsolete for certain applications. Most aircraft operate on some type of jet engine, which involves the same core concepts of thermodynamics and aeronautics, but are still fundamentally different. They also optimize for different criteria, which is why neither jet engines nor piston engines hold a monopoly on any class of vehicle.
This is really stretching the computer metaphor. I think my point is that there will be room for rethinking paradigms as our applications of computers grow to include things that weren't originally planned for. But in a mature technology there's a lot of established precedent, and that's not easily overcome. It takes something that can improve the field like jet engines made new aircraft possible.
Depends on the level of abstraction you're looking at. Operating systems today are vastly more capable of organizing different provesses, distributing work amongst multiple CPU cores, CPU caches, etc. I guess the von Neumann architecture has just proven really successful in practice. And von Neumann machines require a certain set of capabilities in their OSes.
Maybe look at embedded systems, where we find a bit more variety. Things like DSPs or microcontrollers.
I have thought the same in my adventures into alternative operating systems.
TempleOS🕌
I think the last one to make any real headway was BeOS and they've been dying a thousand deaths ever since Apple bought NeXT instead of them. Though admittedly that perspective is coming from a person who used BeOS once in the 90s and has never touched Haiku.
Plan 9 became Inferno and was quite successful as a distributed OS for network appliances.
What about Fuchsia?
Is that really different? I thought, it's just a "regular" OS.