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Comment by antihipocrat | Hacker News Reader

>>have an operating system for AMD64 hardware that is overtly governed (not Linux or FOSS)

Not understanding this part, aren't Linux distros achieving this already without licence restrictions and various levels of stability depending on the distro selected?

A huge amount of enterprise tooling is now being run on the cloud through the browser or via electron - for a large number of businesses, their staff would only need the equivalent of a Chromebook style GUI to perform their work.

Native software is still essential for a small % of users.. is this what you're suggesting needs to be solved? A single alternative open source system (OS or VM?) that the software dev company can target.

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>Not understanding this part, aren't Linux distros achieving this already without licence restrictions and various levels of stability depending on the distro selected?

No. Ask yourself, if I install distro <pick one>, can I run a complex binary from 2015 on it? To pull of that kind of stunt you need to ensure you have control over changes not only in the kernel, but also in all of the associated user libraries and management tools. There are change paths for everything from how daemons get started to how graphics are rendered and sound is produced that are incompatible with themselves, much less other versions from 10 years ago. That is not a support burden that someone selling a specialized piece of software can easily take on. It makes their cost of development higher and so their price higher which loses them business.

Yeah, if it uses the Win32 API!

Thanks to Wine, it’s the most stable API/ABI Linux has!

I’m kind of joking, but the main issue probably lies with the libc rather than with Linux itself.

I get that you're kind of joking but your right! Because nobody can "change" the Win32 ABI except Microsoft you don't get contributors pushing various "feature improvements" on it, not that there aren't a bunch of things one might do differently than the way the Win32 API does them, right? It's that externally enforced control that isn't possible with Linux/FOSS ecosystems. The 'why' of that is because people like Canonical can't afford to pay enough engineers to 'own' the whole system, and their user base gets bent out of shape when they do. It breaks the social contract that Linux has established.

The only way to change that is to start with a new social contract which is "You pay us to license a copy of this OS and we'll keep it compatible for all your apps that run on it."

While I sympathize with your need, I don't think we'll see a new OS fill this space.

Firstly, there's the obvious "all the apps you run on it". Your new OS has no apps, and even if a few emerged no business really wants to commit to running on a new OS with only a couple apps.

I mean, if you want a stable OS there's always BSD, or BeOS or whatever. Which we ignore because, you know, Windows. (And I know it's fun to complain about ads on windows and Microsoft in general, but there's a reason they own the market.) OH, and business users don't see the things folk complain about anyway.

Personally I have utilities on windows that were last compiled over 20 years ago that still run fine.

Secondly no OS operates in a vacuum. You need to store data, (database) browse the web, communicate, secure traffic and so on. Those are very dynamic. And again (by far) the most stable place to run those things is Windows. Like Postgres 9, from 15 years ago, is still used in production.

Of course it's also possible to freeze any OS and apps at any time and it will "run forever " - or at least until the version of TLS supports dies.

So no, I don't believe there will be a new OS. Windows Phone died because there were no apps. Your new OS will have the same problem.

> No. Ask yourself, if I install distro <pick one>, can I run a complex binary from 2015 on it?

Does a Go binary count? Half joking, but this is why “builds statically, only depends on syscalls” is making inroads. Also applied to static linking musl.

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