You may want to check out the *BSD OSes like FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. Just try them. Watch some videos to see what they're about. They might very well appeal to you. I personally think they are great and am embracing them (particularly OpenBSD) over Linux for most new computers I set up.
I want to know the answer to this. I have a really good track record of picking things that are about to get hot (julia, elixir, zig). As much as I love linux, I also hate it. I'm ready for the next OS.
> Actually in case Fuchsia manages to replace - well, I would be happy. But would it really happen?..
Would you be happy? Google has a poor track record of maintenance, not to mention monstrosities like angular, golang, kubernetes... I shudder to think about what a Google OS would look like.
Well, fuchsia seems to be better designed and from what I've heard they had intention to rewrite their kernel in Rust. Eventually.
Fuchsia seems to be FOSS.
So, in case a new userland appears on top of this legacy-free system I, probably, would be happier than I am right now on damn Linux where nothing works as it should and everything segfaults.
Problem is that the software license has become irrelevant for the largest tech companies. In the old days there was a fear among them, and probably rightly so, that their software would be "stolen" if they went open source.
But today every large corporation is running projects as open source without any fear. What happened? For one these projects are so complex it is not feasible for Joe the programmer to read thru all of it, it takes a company of the size of Google or Microsoft to manage it.
The other thing is that the business model changed. Now they give stuff away for "free" to lock you in and spy on your every move and then monetize it.
Third is the close integration of hardware and software, so even if someone forked Fuchsia it would be utterly pointless because of hardware.
What Google has shown is that it is possible to operate one of that largest spying agencies in the world all on open source.
I think rust is a singularly poor choice to write a kernel, due to the datastructures required, poor support and interop between libraries and nostd, in the long run macros obscuring code and making understanding timing attacks difficult, e.g. but that's just my opinion... If you have the resources of google, you might as well write it in another language and apply a proof solver for security assurances (or just use SeL4).
Windows is a mix of legacy C code, which started to be migrated into C++ around the Vista time (hence /kernel in VC++) and .NET/COM (WinRT is basically COM with some extras).
It does, and several teams seem lost in political battles trying to make their own stack the next UI while handwaving the chaos, yet Win32/Forms/MFC/WPF aren't going away, if one wants to code something today that will keep on running.
I bet Windows 11 will still provide the VB 6 runtime.
"It just works" is a factor for a lot of people and businesses.
Whether or not this is possible because Microsoft is an aggressive, monopolistic company is a different conversation altogether.
I pulled up Azure last weekend to see what the pain level would be on standing up a new corporate environment for our organization. It turned out to be so easy I just did most of it on Friday night. The thing that was most staggering to me was the ease with which I could provision AD DS services. I don't even know where those computers are. I am more than happy to not have that problem on my hands anymore. Some of you will argue that this is a perk of Azure and not Windows, but I would say that Windows is the enabling factor behind a lot of this automation.
On Monday morning, I handed everyone new windows credentials and it all just worked. No fucking bullshit. VPN, certs, office, outlook, visual studio, everything.
For organizations that don't have time for bullshit, Windows seems like a reasonable option to me. I know a lot of you can come up with an unlimited supply of one-off reasons why windows should never be used, but the harsh reality is the entire ecosystem considered together is fucking wonderful if you don't have an unlimited IT budget and need to turn a profit to survive.
I'm in the middle of installing Windows for business purposes, and this is far from my experience. I've yet to see it "just work."
Installation was a hassle! THREE hours just staring at a various setting-up screens. And then it has the gall to bully me for using an offline account; it screeches about my "diminished experience" because I refuse to accede to its native advertising. Want to uninstall Edge? Sorry, your moral superiors at Microsoft decided it's better for your own good that you don't.
Now I'm having to jump through hoops to figure out how to get it to use a shared directory, all because Microsoft decided they _just_ had to cut its own path through the CLI jungle as opposed to just using bog-standard bash.
The ecosystem seems user-hostile and full of more bullshit than any amount of Linux. I just don't see it.
Nit pick: Bash is only standard on GNU, it has never been standard anywhere else. You may be thinking of the Bourne shell, although neither bash nor the Bourne shell include a standard for shared directories, so I'm curious what you mean is bog-standard there.
I'll have to review my shell terminology; however, I'll assume you're correct here, and in that case I'll eat crow on both points. I appreciate the nit-pick! It's good information, and an obvious blind-spot that I should improve upon.
The "bog-standard" I'm referring to is my ability in various Linux distros to easily find and mount network-shared directories. I assumed this was some power of bash, but if not then I'll reflect on that and find whichever utility enables the ease of my workflow.
Well, better is subjective but a couple of reasons that make it a default choice for most use cases:
- User familiarity
- Prevalence
- Pre-installed
As an aside, I’ve installed plenty of Linux instances on people’s old hardware. In situations where I’ve set it up so everything “just works”, and where they were not big Windows users in the first place (so didn’t have to re-train muscle memory/find things) I found they got along just fine.
By a chance - is there anything better? Pretty please?..
Actually in case Fuchsia manages to replace - well, I would be happy. But would it really happen?..