Asklemmy

43945 readers

676 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

100

If you could make a non-linux OS go mainstream, which one would you pick? (programming.dev)

submitted 5 months ago by ICastFist@programming.dev to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

83 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I make the specification of non-linux because otherwise this would just become a thread full of obscure distros that do the same thing as a million other distros.

Some lesser known OSs:

AROS - based on Amiga OS, has some derivatives like IcarOS and MorphOS
Haiku - based on BeOS
Redox - Unix-like, made in Rust (might technically count as linux?)
Serenity - Unix-like, very late 90s look and feel
Kolibri - Tiny OS, the image is ~44MB. It also has a smaller version that fits in a single floppy.
PhantomOS - When 3 Russians decide to turn everything about a typical OS upside down.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

At a quick glance on the wiki page, it sounds like something that would work great if we needed hundreds "dumb" terminals that just connected to a central server and received/displayed the output back to the user

[–] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 8 points 5 months ago

Incorrect. That’s X11; we have that. Plan 9 is a little hard to explain quick, but I gave some examples already of stuff that is trivial with it that’s a big weird difficulty on other modern systems, but in addition to that the whole UI and the terminal / editor also work radically differently to how Unixlike systems do it.

[–] marzhall@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago

That's most of what we do today.

Every web app you use right now - which is most of your day for most users - is just a dumb terminal UI hitting some API on some foreign computer.

Plan 9 uses the file system as a way of interacting with apis. Linux took this idea directly by copying in the/proc filesystem from 9, which are not bytes on a disk but are instead the kernel presenting its running processes in the format of files and directories in your file namespace, and with which you can interact to control those processes.

It also took this idea and created FUSE - file systems in user space - so that you can do the same thing on Linux as a user, but with not quite the same ease you have on plan 9 - and notably, fuse file systems are not naturally network file systems, and so you can't export them as easily to the network as you can with nine machines, where it's implicit.

Last, Linux took the idea of per-process namespaces from 9, setting the stage for all of the docker, snap, etc. tools we use today.

In short, a lot of nine already is mainstream because it's been adopted by Linux. However, using plan 9 and then returning back to Linux feels like putting on bulky gloves, because Linux did not start with these concepts in mind, but bolted them on after.

/Tinyrant