Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

I thought it was going to be some boring material UI screenshots, but this is so much more interesting! Susceptible to the usual C bugs, albeit with minor impact. I thought they were switching most of the kernel and drivers to Rust, for some reason.

Edit: not a Rust fanboy by any means, hell, I've never even opened a Rust file.

This debate about monolithic vs. micro-kernels has been had many times. Maybe this time the resolution is different, who knows. But FWIW Linux didn't reach its success because someone made a feature comparison between it and what else was out there in a spreadsheet and somehow discovered how Linux was so much better. Instead, Linux won (and continues to win) because it's the Rocky Balboa of operating systems. It may loose the first round, but it always come back. And the reason for that is that Linux's biggest feature isn't necessarily technical. Rather, it's the community of people around it, the fact that it can tolerate a healthy dose of disagreement and infighting before eventually finding and settling on whatever best solution solves the next immediate problem, not some far-into-future idealistic goal. The downside to that development model is that radical changes take several iterations/years while in a centrally-managed OS development model can be shoved in "atomically" -- ex: real-time, tracing, etc. You can devise many a great OSes on paper and even implement them. Bootstrapping an entire ecosystem and, effectively, institutionalize a completely open and nimble development model such as that of the Linux kernel is a whole other story.

Keep in mind, too, that path dependence plays a huge role here. Linux took off when the alternatives were Windows NT, Novell Netware, or commercial Unixes running on underpowered RISC hardware.

I would love to see an interactive map of Zircon, similar to the one of the (older) Linux kernel - https://makelinux.github.io/kernel/map/

Would that really ever happen? Microsoft - a company so dominant it got an antitrust lawsuit - hasn't even been able to get 90% of the market share. No operating system since the very early days of computing has.

Not only that, but other older operating systems are always going to have an advantage here anyway: they'll have support, ecosystems, documentation, and people with years of experience with them.

Google isn't even a monopoly in search for heaven's sake! Only 87% of people use Google Search. If they can't get a monopoly there - and you really can't get a monopoly in almost any industry without government help - what makes you think they can get a near-monopoly in operating systems?