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A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)

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121–130 of 188 posts

Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)

#121
post #119

All I want is an OS that has as few of the weaknesses as possible and all the best things about all the current major operating systems; examples: Flagship gaming support from Windows, Stability and flexibility from Linux, and Design principles from MacOS. Each of those three operating systems have some weaknesses that makes me jump between them quite often. Things like: Forced updates in Windows 10, certain lack of…

Flagship gaming support from Windows, Stability and flexibility from Linux, and Design principles from MacOS

I would love such an OS too! Sadly I'm not aware of anything that ticks the three, but at least ElementaryOS [1] attempts to tackle the last two. I enjoyed it three years ago, though I had to move to MacOS for work so I'm unsure about how it is now.

[1] https://elementary.io/

Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)

#122

Operating Systems are commonly viewed from two major standpoints: managing computing resources, and hiding hardware idiosyncrasies while putting a friendly face for a user. The important hardware in this age is the 'collection of datacentres'. Things like Kubernetes and whatever Amazon calls their thing these days are the proto 'operating systems' for this hardware. What we currently think of as Operating Systems are…

> whatever Amazon calls their thing

Depending on what "thing" you're talking about, it might also be Kubernetes. See: EKS.

Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)

#123
post #47
post #33

Can someone describe the NEGATIVE aspects of having a database-OS?

First enumerate all of the constraints and guarantees your database provides. All the basic minimum services it provides for every access. Look at the memory it takes to provide those, and the processor utilisation overhead to perform all those checks, and services such as to guarantee ACID compliance, guarantee referential integrity, enforce a global type system, etc, etc. Every single access of every single piece o…

Even my database doesn't incur all overheads for every operation. I don't know why an OS designed around the concept would. It's interface, not implementation.

Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)

#124
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being an RTOS is only necessary if your application has a requirement for real-time response and is also itself designd for bounded-response-time. Ignoring drivers for the moment, your typical desktop application does not have a need for a bounded response time. Desktop applications typically do not fail due to a dialog box being popped up a few milliseconds late. The underlying drivers, on the other hand, do tend to…

> Desktop applications typically do not fail due to a dialog box being popped up a few milliseconds late. No they won't fail but a responsive user interface is critical. A process running on an RTOS won't complete any faster (probably the opposite), but displaying some sort of acknowledgement that a key has been pressed or a button has been clicked without any human perceptible delay is really nice. I'd love for the…

Real-time response and a/an RTOS are not the same thing. An RTOS only allows processes with a known (or computable) runtime to run so that it may make guarantees about timing of execution. In some RTOSes scheduling may be entirely static and determined at compile time. This type of OS is used in critical systems (aircraft, hospital equipment, nuclear bombs). It's not really the type of system you'd want for a general purpose operating system.

Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)

#126
post #119

All I want is an OS that has as few of the weaknesses as possible and all the best things about all the current major operating systems; examples: Flagship gaming support from Windows, Stability and flexibility from Linux, and Design principles from MacOS. Each of those three operating systems have some weaknesses that makes me jump between them quite often. Things like: Forced updates in Windows 10, certain lack of…

> Stability and flexibility from Linux

I might have been using linux wrong. Because as a daily driver media consumption device, it has been anything but stable. I suspect it is because it was a laptop with a discrete graphics card, which for some reason completely trips linux up.

> Forced updates in Windows 10

I think this has been solved in a recent update

Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)

#127
post #119

All I want is an OS that has as few of the weaknesses as possible and all the best things about all the current major operating systems; examples: Flagship gaming support from Windows, Stability and flexibility from Linux, and Design principles from MacOS. Each of those three operating systems have some weaknesses that makes me jump between them quite often. Things like: Forced updates in Windows 10, certain lack of…

Well, this is very similar to the Haiku project's goals, though of course on many of these fronts we're only partway there. Care to come join us? :)

Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)

#128
I think there is a lot to dislike in today’s lineup of OS, but I don’t think it is worth doing a full redesign until we have open source hardware and persistent memory. Persistent memory will cause a need to redesign the OS anyway and open source hardware will enable new dynamics in the community. Linux or whatever you have on the client side will have to do until then. Hopefully we will get an OS that takes security seriously. Actor model for robust scaling and capability based security.

Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)

#129
post #119

All I want is an OS that has as few of the weaknesses as possible and all the best things about all the current major operating systems; examples: Flagship gaming support from Windows, Stability and flexibility from Linux, and Design principles from MacOS. Each of those three operating systems have some weaknesses that makes me jump between them quite often. Things like: Forced updates in Windows 10, certain lack of…

Well, this is very similar to the Haiku project's goals, though of course on many of these fronts we're only partway there. Care to come join us? :)

Hey, thanks for sticking to it. You're doing important work.

Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)

#130
post #126
post #119

All I want is an OS that has as few of the weaknesses as possible and all the best things about all the current major operating systems; examples: Flagship gaming support from Windows, Stability and flexibility from Linux, and Design principles from MacOS. Each of those three operating systems have some weaknesses that makes me jump between them quite often. Things like: Forced updates in Windows 10, certain lack of…

> Stability and flexibility from Linux I might have been using linux wrong. Because as a daily driver media consumption device, it has been anything but stable. I suspect it is because it was a laptop with a discrete graphics card, which for some reason completely trips linux up. > Forced updates in Windows 10 I think this has been solved in a recent update

Linux is extremely stable as a headless server. We have instances running for years with no issues.

That is where Linux's reputation for stability most likely comes from.

However as a desktop machine mainly used for media consumption I would take windows over linux any day. No doubt due to poor graphics and audio driver support.

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