UNIX, as a viable OS model, isn't the last word in operating system design. It has too much design decisions and other baggage rooted in technology dating back to the 1970s. As Rob Pike, one of the people who worked on UNIX, said "Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad."
On top of that, Linux essentially sucked all the air out of the UNIX development space by killing off all the commercial UNIXes. Carrying Linux forward rests largely on the shoulders of the kernel team and whatever contributions other businesses feel like making.
So where is the next major OS coming from? Google and Microsoft are the last two companies with the talent to build a future OS and enough resources and clout to push it enough to get traction. (In theory, it could also come from the community but people like Linus only come along once in a generation.)
> Google and Microsoft are the last two companies with the talent to build a future OS and enough resources and clout to push it enough to get traction.
I think that is a stretch. Apple has significant investment in Darwin and are a huge contributor to LLVM. Also, don't count out Amazon ... they have their fingers in so many pies these days ...
That's a pretty ridiculous statement. Amazon won't dump money into BS just because, but they are absolutely willing to take big risks if the payoff is there.
Both big risk and long term? I don't think so. They're not a company with much philosophical vision. They provide good, useful, services to make money. That's not enough to start a successful operating system.
I don't mean to bash Amazon. They do well what they do, at the scale they have. I only think the project would not fit the company as it is now.
I'm saying you fundamentally misunderstand Amazon. The entire thing is based on long term thinking. It's why they spent decades building out a massive logistics infrastructure instead of turning a profit. It's why they spend tons on robotics, drones, and grocery stores that can eb run without people. They have been manufacturing tablets for years. They built kindle. They built a (disaster of a) phone.
Amazon doesn't waste money just because. But if they saw the potential return in developing an OS (say they decide that having a custom OS as their base for AWS) they are absolutely the type of company that would pursue it.
> Apple has significant investment in Darwin and are a huge contributor to LLVM.
Apple could make the next OS for Apple (presuming they were willing to take the leap to do something other than incremental improvements to their existing stable of OSes), but they aren't likely to make OSes for anyone else, so they aren't really relevant to the discussion.
> Also, don't count out Amazon ... they have their fingers in so many pies these days ...
Amazon seems to be pretty consistently plucking the low-hanging fruit from their current position. They might have the right talent to build a future OS, butz for a slightly different reason than Apple, it doesn't seem to be consistent with their orientation.
"Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad."
That's not an opinion necessarily shared by others who worked on UNIX and still do in some cases.
Certainly, there are commercial UNIX releases today that have relatively recent innovations and capabilities that still aren't available in other operating systems.
Linux wasn't really good before it became popular.
I think it won because it offered neutral grounds (a place where lots of players who don't have huge market power can meet without fear of being swindled) and, partly, out of luck (you could call it 'good timing', but I don't think Linus considered that)
Eh. The biggest thing Linux had going for it in terms of winning market share was running on commodity x86 parts in a time period when the commercial Unices weren't touching it, and x86 made really strong gains in beating everybody else at performance per dollar.
> The biggest thing Linux had going for it in terms of winning market share was running on commodity x86 parts in a time period when the commercial Unices weren't touching it
From the 1980s to 1993 there were:
v7 ports: Microsoft Xenix (later became SCO), Venix, Coherent
System III ports: PC/IX (later 386/ix)
SVR3 ports: official Intel, ESIX from Everex
SVR4 ports: Dell UNIX, Novell UnixWare, Microport
Strictly speaking, Coherent wasn't a V7 port – they wrote the code from scratch rather than using any of AT&T's code, and they never paid AT&T any Unix license fees.
AT&T was suspicious, but even after a careful investigation by Dennis Ritchie himself, they couldn't prove any of their code had been copied.
Given both the V7 source code and Coherent source code have now been released, you can compare them yourself and form your own opinion, if you'd like.
Microsoft abandoned Xenix when AT&T decided to commercialize Unix with SVR4.
OS/2 was, in fact, created to be Microsoft's Xenix replacement (and then when Microsoft fell out with IBM, we got NT as Xenix's replacement's replacement).
"Microsoft abandoned Xenix when AT&T decided to commercialize Unix with SVR4."
They not only kept supporting it via SCO Group but even used that company to bankroll an attempt to kill Linux in court. IBM, dependent on Linux, promised a billion dollar battle. Company eventually went bankrupt but its "real UNIX" is still in use by Fortune 500 companies as legacy systems. That they sold inventory-management solutions on top of SCO Server means quite a few are mission-critical. That money coming in is probably why they keep fighting over whether it should stay bankrupt or not.
Okay? Red Hat Enterprise Linux wasn't released until 2000, so I don't know what Microsoft's late-80s UNIX distribution has to do with it. Google was running Linux from the early days, and they launched in 1998, which is nearly a decade after Xenix stopped being updated.
EDIT: Yes, Linux has its origins sooner, and if you want to know why Linux beat the BSDs to mindshare, what was going on in 1993 is very important. But Linux wasn't competing for mindshare with Xenix, it was stuff like Solaris (which did have an x86 port, but was mostly running on SPARC), AIX (which was mostly IBM big-iron and POWER), HP-UX (which was PA-RISC and IA-64), etc.
If you want to talk about post-1993, saying that Linux won because there weren't any commercial x86 Unices makes even less sense. Xenix did not stop being updated, it became SCO UNIX. SCO bought and continued to sell UnixWare from Novell in 1995. x86 Solaris came out in 1993, but Sun actually had an x86 Unix since 1991 when they bought ISC.
The first time I saw Linux in a work environment was in '96 as a Samba file server on our office LAN, which was otherwise dominated by Windows NT machines. I think it was set up partly for novelty (someone wanted to play with Linux), and partly to save money on not buying one more Windows license.
Actually the free of charge aspect limited uptake of Linux in the commercial sector for a long time. It has it's faults but Linux won by being a great software.
>On top of that, Linux essentially sucked all the air out of the UNIX development space by killing off all the commercial UNIXes.
For good reason too. The commercial UNIXes were absurdly expensive, and they were all incompatible with each other too. There's a reason all the software developers abandoned UNIX and went to Windows. UNIX killed itself with ridiculous license fees and fragmentation. Linux saved it by making it free, open-source, and unifying it and using common standards instead of a bunch of vendors trying to make their own hoping to gain marketshare and ending up losing everything to MS. Of course, this hasn't prevented Linux from having its own share of fragmentation (the different DEs chiefly), but it's nothing like the UNIX Wars of the 80s.
Lets start with package formats, people discuss this matter as if it were building an app for ios vs android. 99.999% of the work is the application. Package formats are just different sets of instructions for building the same source code the works ultimately on any system so long as its required libraries are present.
Continuing on with audio, virtually everyone uses pulseaudio. JACK is pretty much reserved for audio production and is its own animal.
The majority of configuration files are similar/the same, most differences are minor. For good or ill most distros are adopting systemd.
Window managers or desktop environments are just components virtually all of which are able to be run on any distribution.
No, package formats aren't just different sets of instructions, because on each distribution certain files might land on different places.
Plus someone has to keep track of those instructions for every single distribution.
Finally, supporting the same format isn't enough, for example a RPM for SuSE isn't the same as a RPM for Red-Hat.
Well, apparently you forgot there are people still using ALSA and OSS.
When doing desktop applications anyone that cares about UI/UX of the respective users wants to integrate with the menu system, notification on the toolbar, context menus, drag-and-drop of the window manager, printing,....
So it isn't just components.
Of course, if the goal is to have a plain twm experience, then forget about what I am saying.
The percentage of desktop users not using pulse is is a rounding error. Firefox doesn't even work without pulse anymore Notifications and menu systems are standardized. Printing doesn't require special work to work on different distros. Drag and drop just isn't part of what a window manager does period its more what your file manager does.
Your valid issues are pretty much limited to the fact that software must be packaged for several distros in order to be suitable for distribution on even most systems and file manager integration is still something that requires you to integrate with gnome AND kde to support most users.
On top of that, Linux essentially sucked all the air out of the UNIX development space by killing off all the commercial UNIXes. Carrying Linux forward rests largely on the shoulders of the kernel team and whatever contributions other businesses feel like making.
So where is the next major OS coming from? Google and Microsoft are the last two companies with the talent to build a future OS and enough resources and clout to push it enough to get traction. (In theory, it could also come from the community but people like Linus only come along once in a generation.)