Asklemmy

43907 readers

897 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

[–] BaumGeist@lemmy.ml 14 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Redox isn't Linux, it uses its own kernel. I want this one to succeed above all others, just because Rust was born to perform this kind of application: guaranteed memory safety when dealing with tens of thousands of lines of code handling hundreds of moving parts running thousands of different tasks, all at a very low level.

I'll second Plan 9, just because it sounds like scifi and truly takes advantage of how interconnected all computing hardware has become.

Third place goes to anything based on GNU Hurd. The microkernel architecture intrigues me, and I'd like to know how it effects the end user. Plus I'm just a big fan of the copyleft/FOSS aspect.

Also, I'd just like any mobile device alternative that's not AOSP, and Linux seems like a bad fit for mobile in general. Why do we need a fully-featured, all-purpose kernel when we're only gonna put it on a known number of SoCs and therefore a known set of hardware configurations? We could be optimizing the hell out of our privacy-friendly mobile OSes, but instead we've shackled ourselves to google or linux