Just out of curiosity, is anybody here looking to create a new consumer operating system to compete with Windows and Mac? I'd like to, but I have no idea where to start. Talk about putting it off because something already exists! :)
Linus Torvalds recently did an interview [0], where he talked about, amongst other things, just how hard it is to get an OS off the ground.
Excerpt: “I used to think that some radical new and exciting OS would come around and supplant Linux some day (hey, back in 1994 I probably still thought that maybe Hurd would do it!), but it's not just that we've been doing this for a long time and are still doing very well, I've also come to realize that making a new operating system is just way harder than I ever thought. It really takes a lot of effort by a lot of people, and the strength of Linux—and open source in general, of course—is very much that you can build on top of the effort of all those other people.
So unless there is some absolutely enormous shift in the computing landscape, I think Linux will be doing quite well another quarter century from now.”
Linux is not, nor has it ever been, a valid consumer operating system. Ever year has supposedly been the year of the linux desktop since 1998 (21 years!). Maybe it's time to give up the hope that Linux will ever challenge Windows or MacOS on the Desktop.
> Linux is not, nor has it ever been, a valid consumer operating system.
I disagree with your assertion since it wasn’t properly qualified. Linux is indeed a valid consumer OS but it has never been a mainstream OS on the desktop. In spite of that, it has become a mainstream consumer OS on mobile, in the form of Android.
Anyway, the original point of my reply was to highlight just how involved building a new OS from scratch is, relative to other software projects you could work on. Add to that the unlikelihood of ever seeing a pay off for the amount of resources that would need to be committed to such an endeavor, unless you are under a big tech company.
What is the point of this whole thread? Did you just want to show what a smart boy you are by stating the obvious? Yes, I'm well aware that developing a new OS is hard. Everything worthwhile in life is hard. Why would I let that stop me?
