I find that remark towards the end of the article interesting; of him being happy if someone came along and did the cool things that Linux can do, but leaner and meaner by getting rid of the accumulated cruft of the decades-dead architectures upon which Linux was born and must still run on. From his remarks earlier on the article, that's more or less what he did with regards to Unix.
I suppose we may see something like that eventually, but this article is now 20 years old. Isn't that about the same amount of time between Unix and Linus beginning to work on Linux? I know there's various new OSes in the works, but nothing has caught on yet. But, it's not like Linux caught on immediately either, ("just a hobby, won't be big and
professional like gnu"). Maybe in another 5 or so years all the systems hackers, professionals and amateurs alike will all be flocking around NewOS, which is so much better and fun to hack on than crufty old Linux.
I'm not convinced we'll have anything that follows Linux. The GPL means that people can't rip it off and fork a closed special version that's needed for their hardware, the result of this being that most ports end up in mainline eventually so you can just kind of expect it to work.
This also means that people doing new things know they'll have the most impact if they do it on Linux and so that's were they do it (plust it being everywhere means they're likely to be familiar with it.)
Personally I think if something new were to come along it would have to have something that makes it interesting socially and I'm not sure there's a lot of room for improvement on that front. It's not impossible it's just a little difficult to imagine.
I think Linus echoes the idea of Linux architecture allowing it to become its own successor in these paragraphs:
"By constructing a general kernel model drawn from elements common across typical architecture, the Linux kernel gets many of the portability benefits that otherwise require an abstraction layer, without paying the performance penalty paid by microkernels.
By allowing for kernel modules, hardware-specific code can often be confined to a module, keeping the core kernel highly portable. Device drivers are a good example of effective use of kernel modules to keep hardware specifics in the modules. This is a good middle ground between putting all the hardware specifics in the core kernel, which makes for a fast but unportable kernel, and putting all the hardware specifics in user space, which results in a system that is either slow, unstable, or both."
So the combination of a kernel model with interfaces reflecting good system design choices, and extensibility through a well defined kernel module interface, allows Linux to migrate to new hardware designs and leverage new components, while continuing to leverage all of the Linux compatible code written over the years. That is a very difficult combination of advantages for a new system to overcome.
Graphics drivers have definitely gone the other way. Those used to be in user space and aren't any more (although not in a microkernel sense, it was more of the DOS "go leave me alone and let me just poke crap into registers" sense.)
That's a serious problem on windows because the only people who can fix it are the authors of the driver. On Linux anyone has access to the source and can fix really bad driver bugs.
> if something new were to come along it would have to have something that makes it interesting socially and I'm not sure there's a lot of room for improvement
The Innovator's Dilemma model of technology disruption suggests that the "next Linux" will be worse in most ways but better for some narrow use case. Perhaps bare-metal containers or unikernels on servers and something like Google's Fuchsia or some RTOS for mobile phones and IoT devices?
The market has clearly demonstrated that it doesn't care about phones being real time. They used to be considered critical systems from what I understand and many did actually run realtime OSes. Now we've got android and iOS (android is about as far from an RTOS as you can get, it's almost impossible to write an app that's not guaranteed to just killed by the OS at some point.)
The examples you gave boil down to 3 narrow use cases:
- The retention project / intellectually stimulating activity of writing your own operating system.
- Licensing.
- Some really specific hardware, where in some sense you're building an operating system in name only. Might as well just call it an application.
I think what OP means by "interesting socially" is that the new Linux isn't going to succeed on any technical or economic merits.
My guess would be the next Linux innovates in some way concerning national or ethnic identity, environmental conscientiousness, or radical politics.
For example, an operating system written in a non-Latin alphabet programming language. Or an operating system that is only delivered for solar-powered hardware. Or whatever is going to be the radical anarchism or communism of the software world (if you think GPL / free software is that, it ain't).
Linux isn't perfect when it comes to hardware. Google has used it for both Android and Chrome OS and the issues that seems to keep showing up are related to updating and testing.
In fact from my personal experience Linux and hardware especially on laptops is very hit or miss.
I'm guessing this is because many hardware companies don't upstream do to patents and other legalities.
If a project comes along that can solve those issues I can see Linux having a GCC LLVM moment.
The update issues are because google is circumventing the mainline kernel and relying on hardware manufactures to provide updates for the entire OS so they can keep the drivers closed source. This benefits google as well because it forces everyone to use their special user space which gives them a lot of control.
If instead drivers were contributed back upstream this wouldn't be a problem.
Personally it's been a while since I've had a laptop with serious driver problems on Linux. Some discrete cards from Nvidia cause problems and there's some weirdness with secure boot but other than those I really haven't seen what you're talking about.
You can use libhybris to provide support for AOSP/Android kernels and vendor components within a mainline userspace. With Project Treble, you could even have a generic userspace image be compatible with a sizeable fraction of "Treblized" devices - there are a few variations for 32-bit vs. 64-bit ARM, and for changes in the system image format, but other than that the Treble images are generic.
I don't think you quite understand what I'm saying? Mainline here refers entirely to the kernel. There is no "mainline linux userspace." (unless you count a handful of Linux specific userspace tools for stuff like ext4 filesystem creation.)
> Personally I think if something new were to come along it would have to have something that makes it interesting socially and I'm not sure there's a lot of room for improvement on that front. It's not impossible it's just a little difficult to imagine.
Google Fuschia (BSD) is planned to succeed billions of Linux-Android installations.
The Linux Foundation is made of a number of companies who are told to behave by the GPL.
IMO, if it weren't for the GPL we would see very few of the contributions made to Linux get handed back to the community. That it more or less runs everywhere is part of what makes it interesting (and was a major point of TFA.)
There are some startups making new kinds of computing hardware. The limiting factor in the success has been software to go with it. There is an opportunity here, maybe
I suppose we may see something like that eventually, but this article is now 20 years old. Isn't that about the same amount of time between Unix and Linus beginning to work on Linux? I know there's various new OSes in the works, but nothing has caught on yet. But, it's not like Linux caught on immediately either, ("just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu"). Maybe in another 5 or so years all the systems hackers, professionals and amateurs alike will all be flocking around NewOS, which is so much better and fun to hack on than crufty old Linux.