Ask HN: Please disrupt operating systems
After reading the post "Ubuntu 10 years" I challenge HN community to disrupt operating systems. Ubuntu barely disrupted anything and even like that they got some market share. It means there is a huge market waiting out there. As I can understand we run on bloated OS's that are not getting faster despite new hardware advances. Seems that OS developers continually add code using old architectures and never optimize anything.
I can't define exactly the problem within the minutes I'm writing this and probably I don't have the knowledge to do it but I can feel that lots of stuff are wrong. While this problem is not solved I don't think we can dive into the future. We are still using obsolete technology to create it.
There's a huge market waiting. Something must be made.
[edit: I'm a non-technical guy, I speak mostly from the point of view of unhappy users, so I removed my superficial opinions about technical aspects.]
15 comments
[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 45.3 ms ] threadWhat you are looking for is a windows manager or theme, not an underlying OS. You seem to have those confused. MacOS, Andriod, Linux, and IOS fundamentally and at their core largely work exactly the same.
Actually at their core, Linux and Andriod are the same OS-- Linux.
So please. If you want to disrupt a market, learn how the market works.
Then, to optimize, learn how the market works.
What you are looking for is a windows manager or theme, not an underlying OS
He most certainly is not. There's a lot more wrong with Linux than just the window manager, which is easily changed. Graphics and wireless drivers, for instance. The impossibility of maintaining a system without falling back on the command line for another. Dear god, the audio subsystems. And there are more.
I feel for the OP because I'm in the same boat. I don't want to use Windows because it's too bloated and uses an ancient filesystem. I don't want to use OS X because each release it gets a little less stable and the performance is erratic. I don't want to use linux because of the weeks I inevitably lose trying to get my NVidia card to work.
Unfortunately, I don't think yet another OS is going to help. The lack of graphics and wireless drivers will still plague it. Even if we start now, it'll be years before it reaches parity with the other major OS's, if it ever does. It'll need its own package scheme for applications (linux's is too complex and OS X's is too proprietary). Unfortunately, this means we'll have to convince app developers to support yet another OS target, which will be a major political undertaking.
The current solutions work well enough that it's hard to justify yet another OS.
This would be disruptive in that it would reduce the stranglehold the Microsoft is able to exert over the OEMs. Akin to selling cars directly to consumers, there would be an upside for the driver vendors that they may get behind.
So HNBuntu isn't "free"- it costs $15 to install on your system.
Perhaps the install has a fallback to the 'free' mode (for secondary devices, etc.)
The POSIX era is closing, it fails to properly model non-serial or disk based data operations. Flowing data like tcp/ip connections are horribly handled in the Unix like model. Linux is a bloated monster with thousands of system calls, and the BSD's are stable but user/developer hostile (MacOSX included at a systems level Darwin has a lot of memory management brain damage).
The problem largely with drivers is a war you can't win.
Windows has backwards compatibility written into it at a very fundamental level. This was a good lesson Windows learned from IBM early on. If you write something for windows 95, it'll likely work with windows8. System32 is still System32. Most your API's, IPC, Draw calls, etc. All still exist, most are actually faster.
The biggest selling point of an IBM mainframe isn't that they are fast. It isn't they have 400+ PPC chips, each with 24 virtual processors. Its that they are binary compatible with IBM System360. If you invested 10 man years writing an application in the 1970's, it still runs today, without the need to write or fix things. It just works. You can have faith in IBM and those guys with gold medallions and bellbottoms who are now balding managers.
Does it fully make economic sense? No. The cost of IBM equipment, support, etc. Is likely way more then 10 man years of software time over 40 year history that application has been deployed.
The fundamental problem is purchaser ignorance. The purchaser may see there are more competitive solutions. But the chain of command doesn't want to invest, it wants to be comfortable. You aren't fighting silicon valley investors so much as you are fighting wall street.
Compare this to say Uber. Which solved a fundamental problem. Hailing taxi's is stupid. Lets make it easier. Ask for a taxi on your app and wait. The quality of your life has improved. The balance sheet looks the same (largely) a taxi costs X dollars. But my throat isn't sore, my arm doesn't hurt, maybe this system is better.
In The Valley the issue would largely be the same.
Linux is king.
If you actually do invent a better solution the Linux. You'll need to convince google, facebook, twitter, amazon, etc. To redeploy all of their applications to your platform. And at best you could offer maybe a 5% performance increase. 5%, to redo billions in software? That won't delay a single upgrade in the data center. Data center costs stay the same, software development costs go up. How does that balance sheet look?
I'll give you a hint. Bad. There is no market, or demand for it. At best it'll end up being another marginalized fringe OS.
P.S.: If you want to do start with Plan9 work up from there, make the kernel interface work like 3.x linux kernal so you can use linux code. Might work.
P.P.S.: Disruption is based on a better product. OS's can never be a better product. OS's fundamentally trade off speed for usability or the opposite.
Also BSD's have roughly as many faults as Liunx, well not as many. But they commit the same POSIX sins that Linux does. I mean POSIX doesn't handle dynamic concurrent data well at all.
It wasn't built with TCP/IP in mind. Sockets are nice work around, but they don't actually fix the problem.
What does this mean?
>While this problem is not solved I don't think we can dive into the future.
>There's a huge market waiting. Something must be made.
Or maybe, just maybe, you have no idea what you're talking about, as you almost admitted yourself.
>I challenge HN community to disrupt operating systems.
I hereby challenge you to do it yourself. No offense intended.
Users don't care tech behind the scene, bloated or perfectly written code. If the software is fulfilling the use case or not is the only things the users care. IMO, the market should be determined based on use case not based on how any software is written.
If you come up with completely revolutionary idea of how a typical user should interact with computer, then probably you can enter into OS market, otherwise it is very very tough market to enter.
It is the purpose that needs changing.
The next operating system I will use will allow me to log in from any terminal anywhere in the world and receive the same experience. The OS will be a simple abstraction layer over my individual data, preferences and even personal UX. It won't matter if I'm looking at a phone or a tablet or a television or my refrigerator, the interface will be tailored to my context and all the same data will be accessible.
Many would argue thnt the web is this OS, and they would be right in many respects. But the main desktop and mobile and refrigerator experiences are still vastly separated; the next OS will remove this separation, as it no longer provides us with any advantage in the great majority of cases.
OS wise, this would bring many challenges. How do you securely sync data, and more importantly, code? Where does a user and their data live when not logged in? How is all the data transfer handled in an efficient way? What lives on each device versus on a server somewhere? How can a user continue to own their data and devices, rather than having them appear amorphous and distant? How do you keep a universal and omnipresent feel without sacrificing the power of using native hardware and capabilities?
Certain cloud services have come far in this area, but none have been ambitious enough to tackle the whole experience.
Do that right, and the world will be yours.
One step in the right direction is ChromeOS (and firefox OS to some degree), and its model IS going to be the future, but the problem with ChromeOS are: (a) web technologies are not mature yet, (b) any new OS should have support for both native and web apps.
However, I do agree on the fact that the experience must be changed, you can't help but feeling that everything you go through in today's computing (particularly desktop computing) seems dated. But then again, I'm not a technical guy either and posing a problem is a hell of a lot easier that fixing it, almost every time.
Oh, well. I guess I'll have to do with the fact that I can communicate with you at the speed of light. For now.