Ask HN: Recommend a new operating system that I could try • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Recommend a new operating system that I could try

#21

Post by prima-facie » Sat, Sep 16, 2017, 2:14 PM UTC

Tomte wrote: post #13

I've never tried HaikuOS, but it's high on my list of things to look at. Sometime. It's BeOS revitalized. Also Minix3. An academic microkernel (although it runs NetBSD userland now, so maybe a bit practical). And if I could ever get my hands on it, QNX. A practical microkernel. MenuetOS is a pure assembler based OS that seems nice.

I've tried most of them. I was impressed with BeOS back in the day and have used it for a few weeks as the main OS on my machine. I tried Haiku for a short time a few years ago. It had potential to be a great OS but it has become irrelevant now. The industry has moved on at such a fast pace that Haiku would need many man-years of development to catch up. I look with sympathy at the development team and their effort knowing that one day they'll lay down their tools and stop working on it for good.

I've only tried QNX very briefly about 15 years ago or so. It had the Neutrino kernel as far as I remember. Unfortunately I don't have any deep insight into it. It's basically a RTOS, with a micro-kernel, with a UNIX compatible environment. I remember the company advertising that it can work on industrial-grade equipment, where a RTOS is needed. I'm surprised to see that Google is now developing something very similar with Magenta but aimed at the desktop.

Re: Ask HN: Recommend a new operating system that I could try

#22

Post by ColinWright » Sat, Sep 16, 2017, 9:23 PM UTC

vram22 wrote: post #14

ColinWright wrote: post #7

I would recommend RISC OS. It's available on the Raspberry Pi, and is definitely different. https://www.riscosopen.org/content/ I worked on RISC OS for many years and have deployed live, real-time safety-critical systems on it. It was a joy to use, although I've not been able to use it for several years now.

Can you briefly say what are the things you found good about it?

Several:

* It was bordering on trivial to write programs with a decent GUI;

* The light-weight, integral message passing system was a joy to use;

* It was clean to use;

* It was small and fast to start up.

It's hard to put it into words, it was simply fun to use, and I could enjoy writing real software.

Re: Ask HN: Recommend a new operating system that I could try

#23

Post by le-mark » Sun, Sep 17, 2017, 4:11 PM UTC

Plan 9, or Oberon are two other options.

Re: Ask HN: Recommend a new operating system that I could try

#24

Post by vram22 » Mon, Sep 18, 2017, 10:48 PM UTC

ColinWright wrote: post #22

vram22 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you briefly say what are the things you found good about it?

Several: * It was bordering on trivial to write programs with a decent GUI; * The light-weight, integral message passing system was a joy to use; * It was clean to use; * It was small and fast to start up. It's hard to put it into words, it was simply fun to use, and I could enjoy writing real software.

Thanks. I will see if I can try it out at some time, if it works on regular PCs, or I may have to get a Pi. The point about easy GUI development interests me, as well as the speed and the message passing system. I had tried out QNX some time ago, when Photon was the GUI system for it, from a CD that came with a computer magazine. It was small too. It was also a message passing system, IIRC, and was also very fast, I remember noticing that, though I only tried it for a short while.