Maybe not yet but I can see Linux's place as the shitbox saviour start slipping a bit in the next few years. Debian dropping x86, distros getting fatter in general.. I can't really see those trends reversing. Meanwhile NetBSD goes against them.
However it goes, the main issue is one no operating system can solve which is modern life relying on the Web and beefier browsers. Unless you want to rebel against that you're probably better off getting a laptop from the past 10 years for < £100 on eBay.
Although I agree with beefier browsers, I also want to say that there are browsers like dillo etc. which can be good enough for simple websites and also not everything needs a web browser to be usable
Imagine this, a system which can watch movies, edit texts, create disks, have curl/wget, send and recieve files using piping server (which is a curl thing) , view pdfs, mpv and what not, a desktop manager, file manager etc.
As someone hacking around with the legendary tiny core linux, I am more and more mind blown each day with just how much can happen in 14-21 MB, you can definitely build a mini self hosting rack with just some remastering as tinycore can actually run podman as well (combine this with alpine containers to create a super duper minimalist self hosting things too)
the possibilities are endless. When I ran tiny core linux on my pc and ran nothing else, It took 21 mb in ram for a whole gui with editors and file managers etc. all running in ram so super fast filesystem with a package manager
I personally wanted to build my own operating system to limit myself to the most minimal system so taht I just study and do nothing else, I thought tiny core was it but then I tried to hack around it and there are sooooo many things in 21 mb, makes me appreciate minimalism
I have to say, the sheer fucking irony of this statement made me do a double-take.
I might be showing my age a bit, but I'm still remembering when web-browsing was considered a "light" activity (without extensions like Web Java), and watching a video was "very computationally expensive".
I guess some shift happened in the early 2010's where video playback was hardware accelerated more frequently; and complicated javascript started taking off as Google unveiled v8.
As much as the tech bro billionare class salivate over the idea of bringing an "everything app" to the market, we already have those. They're called browsers.
This might be one of the reasons why things like chatgpt (OpenAI) etc. are releasing atlas etc.
This is their attempt of everything app, where the whole internet would be behind the UI of their chatbot and it would go through an LLM before being changed by it and then it would pass to us.
Your single comment explains a lot really and this is something that I agree. Everything App is the browser/internet, combining it with things like wasm, you can even run whole iso files in browser wasm itself (Its fresh on my mind because I shared it to somebody on HN right now but try out copy.sh/v86 [1])
How is TLS negotiation and transport on older hardware (with no AES-NI hardware acceleration)?
I remember it used to be expensive as heck to do TLS back in 2014~, so much so that we bought accelerator cards and segmented "secure" servers so that load wouldn't hit the ordinary browsing of our sites...
However it goes, the main issue is one no operating system can solve which is modern life relying on the Web and beefier browsers. Unless you want to rebel against that you're probably better off getting a laptop from the past 10 years for < £100 on eBay.