Hi,
This is a long post. Thankfully I have some time today, so I'll attempt to discuss the topic.
Quote:
At this point, I think the question is, can this forum continue in a civil manner?
Probably, but we should work towards that. If it's not possible, useful information from the forums should be put to the wiki and the forums be deleted. A lot of drama has been put in here it's not making us any good.
Quote:
The next question is, does this forum serve any purpose any more other than to be a breeding ground of hostile posts? Is OS-dev really what people come here for, or is this now just a more carefully curated version of the many, many fora which exist as Monty Python-esque Argument Rooms?
I'd estimate that, roughly, the 50% of posts in here are trolling/baiting/uncivil/etc posts. And some 45% of posts in here are questions that could be answered by doing an hour's worth of research. And just the remaining 5% of posts in here are posts that actually have something interesting/useful to say. Ideally, it should be 40% of posts to be interesting questions, 40% of posts to be interesting answers, 10% of posts to be interesting ideas and the remaining 10% of posts to be casual off-topic discussion.
Quote:
And while we're at it, is OS-Dev even going to continue to be possible on mainstream hardware any longer, at a time when (as I have long opined) PCs themselves are being supplanted by smartphones, tablets, and Smart TVs for the majority of the public (most of whom never had a PC to begin with)? There will always be a need for PCs, true (at least until a better interface for general-purpose use than "keyboard, pointing device, screen, and speakers" is developed), but I expect that fewer people will be using them regularly in the future, not more, as was always the case since home computers were developed. Many people will still use one at work, on some level or another, and students, writers, programmers and such will need something like them, but most people's "daily driver" is now a phone.
Even if phones are mainstream and you can do almost everything on most phones (I don't own such a phone), I disagree that PCs will be "mostly displaced". I know of only two candidates from my generation (around 20-30 years old) that
may not own a PC (of course I'm biased since I'm studying Digital Systems, but anyway).
Quote:
Is it even realistic now? We've seen the trouble people have with UEFI, and while that trouble is IMAO mostly from inertia and fear of change, the fact remains that PCs themselves are getting locked down somewhat over time. It isn't as bad as all that - as long as there are component builds, it can't be locked down entirely, and there is a refreshing shift to open documentation, if not necessarily open standards, among mobo and video card vendors.
UEFI is a needlessly complex booting interface that is the result of over-engineering. ACPI is a needlessly complex power management interface that is the result of over-engineering. The x86 ISA is a result of adding extensions over extensions over extensions... over a badly designed, this time under-engineered, 16-bit ISA with no foresight. Indeed, someone needs to do an open hardware platform with open hardware interfaces that favour extensibility and forwards compatibility, and without repeating past design mistakes.
Note: I won't be the one to do that, as my FPGA is unfortunately sitting there unused and I'm even neglecting CPUDev.org (I'd be happy if someone could take it over).Quote:
And there is, as always, the big question: what is the end game for most of the people here, and is it fair to enable people with unrealistic goals? - and let's face it, if your goal is anything other than 'climb the mountain because it is there' or 'curiosity', it almost certainly is unrealistic, because the market for new OSes is zero.
I still think a better OS could find some users, even if it's just because of them being curious, or because you've done everything better, less bloated and faster (and you have written replacements for almost all software used on Windows/Linux). But, I agree, it's very unlikely and it's going to take a lot of time.
Quote:
Indeed, there is a commercial market for exactly one PC OS, exactly one mobile OS, and a handful of RTOSes (where the deciding factors mostly are, "do I really need an OS at all?" "will 'Real-time Linux' suffice?", "Does it run on the CPU I am using in this configuration?", "Does it operate within the design constraints?", and most of all, "Does our PHB like it?"). And the occupants of those seats won't be removed out of technical superiority alone. Anyone who says otherwise is crazier than I am.
It's probably something like "technical_superiority * ease_of_use * marketing^2 * pushing_every_manufacturer_to_preinstall_your_os^3". So, Windows is used by the 90% of PC users because of marketing and it being preinstalled on almost all PCs. Linux, while having several strengths like better scripting and better customisability, is fundamentally broken in many places. The most serious issue with Linux is that it's a monolithic kernel, so drivers should be put inside the kernel (ugh). Nvidia would be probably happy to supply a userspace driver and it would be mostly well-received even if proprietary. But no, it should be open-source (yay) so it can be put inside the kernel (again ugh), so Linus had to resort to his famous saying "Nvidia, **** you" to make up for his incompetence.
Quote:
Linux on the desktop exists mainly as a protest vote. Linux for servers and devices (which has a vastly greater impact than Desktop Linux) exists because software doesn't really work as a commercial product at all - the fact is, as I have said before, we still haven't worked out a workable funding model for software development, and all the ones we've staggered along under for the past sixty years are fundamentally broken - and unlike the consumer and business fields, the server admins and hardware developers can't really afford to play by flawed rules simply out of inertia and politesse.
I don't know what to say about this. Indeed, most of us started using Linux to protest against Microsoft. For servers, it's because missing drivers for fancy peripherals like printers and GPUs don't matter, so Linux's strengths are more apparent. As for a successful software development funding model, I also don't know how could it look like.
Regards,
glauxosdever