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.
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.
I installed plan 9 successfully about 15 years ago. And then I did not know what to do.
There was at one time a group pushing to make a more active up to date. User friendly plan 9. Distro if I remember correctly called Harvey OS. They may still be at it. But such a small group means that it’s going to take a long time combined with a lot of effort. And at this point so many things have moved on and become rather linux specific even. That the task only keeps getting more and more difficult.
Honestly, in the interim, many of plan 9’s better features were adopted in some small part or completely by other operating systems. Definitely not quite as elegantly.
What I really want to know is why is nobody here talking about inferno. It’s what came after plan 9.
Sounds like my experience with QNX 6. It was fun for a while, especially with the microkernel novelty. I could kill the mouse driver and bring it back to life. It was interesting to have that on a 486 with memory corruption issues.
RedoxOS >>> It’s written in Rust and is learning both from the success of Linux by being source compatible with it and from smaller/experimental OS like Plan9, seL4, Minix and BSD.
Why arch tho
Is it a “beginner to proficient” list, or “sane to 1ns4n3”?
I literally learned about this yesterday after I saw it in my WSL process list.
Linux is a gateway drug to operating systems considered most unnatural.
Stock debian >>>
My beard isn’t thick enough for Plan 9 😔
