I’ve often thought it might be time for humanity to take the lessons learned from *Nix and Windows/DOS and come up with something better.
I realize this is HN, but not everything needs to be an industry disrupter. Honestly, I'm here more for the weird, impractical experiments than anything else.
One of the reasons why we have all this mess with UWP, WinRT, WinUI and WinAppSDK.
They could have followed Android's approach where everyone works together for that incremental upgrade, but alas.
Genode OS
SerenityOS
BeOS/Haiku
From Oberon linage, AOS is still around at ETHZ
Inferno
Erlang, Go, Oberon, Java and .NET targeting bare metal workloads where the runtime plays the role of the OS.
And most likely a few others I have forgotten.
I've noticed, and I'm not the only one, that HN has developed a particular reputation in the tech community. A number of people I know don't actually like having their work show up on "the orange site" because of that Comic-Book-Guy culture.
Just seems counter to the spirit of hacking to judge somebody's experiments through the lens of a VC pitch.
And it's a reaction I've seen on here before, so I guess I'm a little sensitive to it, maybe because my personal projects are the kind that would attract similar criticism if they ever showed up here.
Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed. And don't expect people to jump in and help you. That's not how these things work. You need to get something half-way useful first, and then others will say "hey, that almost works for me", and they'll get involved in the project.
“Linus is a good developer, but is a terrible engineer. I'm sure that he'll agree with me.”
:)
You could build compatibility layers for porting the most complex stuff, but the idea is that an advanced, better OS would make it trivial to build the most commonly used applications for everyday use, and provide benefits on top of them that would make the switch to the new system worthwhile.
You just have to use it.
When Cutler went to Microsoft the restrictions where clearly the slow and small PC's (the main customers of MS), so that really "cut" the system down (pun intended). Like the Idea to implement NT as a pure microkernel, but it was just too slow for the normal home PC, and that's why NT is kind of a hybrid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler#Microsoft_(1988_-_...