Hacker News Reader

Comment by lifis | Hacker News Reader

There are only 4 successful general purpose production OSes (GNU/Linux, Android/Linux, Windows, OS X/iOS) and only one of those made by the open source community (GNU/Linux).

And a new OS needs to be significantly better than those to overcome the switching costs.

View on HN

> There are only 4 successful general purpose production OSes

Feel like you are using a very narrow definition of "success" here. Is BSD not successful? It is deployed on 10s of millions of routers/firewalls/etc in addition to being the ancestor of both modern MacOS and PlaystationOS...

What about IBM i and z/OS, and Stratus VOS, and Burroughs MCP, and Tandem GUARDIAN, and VxWorks and OS-9 and… These all not only still exist but run huge transaction volume (for the mainframe and minicomputer systems) and run a huge amount of embedded systems (for the embedded OSes).

> And a new OS needs to be significantly better than those to overcome the switching costs.

Who cares if nobody switches to it as their daily driver? The goal you proposed was "viable", not "widely used". The former is perfectly possible without LLMs (as history has proved), and the latter is unrelated to how you choose to make the OS.

None of this counters the argument I made above :-)

Just because they have been made before LLMs doesn't mean it can be done again, since there was just one success (GNU/Linux) and that success makes it much harder for new OSes since they need to better then it

Well, by this logic there have been 0 successful OSes made with LLMs so far...

> Just because they have been made before LLMs doesn't mean it can be done again

Erm...no? That's exactly what that means.

Earth-Ovens haven't been in widespread use for hundreds of years. People can still use them to bake bread however: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAJqGVxuJPo

Reply on news.ycombinator.com