Altium REJECTS takeover bid from Autodesk

[T3sl4co1l]

Linux didn’t “pop out of the woodwork”, it was the alignment of the stars of a good open source kernel with the already mature GNU toolset. And frankly, Linux has hardly made a dent in Windows as a desktop OS, despite years of it being “ready for the desktop, for real this time!”. (The Mac has, however, made significant inroads over the past decade.) So whether it’s even truly a competitor is debatable IMHO.

It's not; and, as far as I can tell, never will be.  Over the weekend, I decided to dedicate a day or two puttering around with an old laptop I have that dual-boots into Debian, 9 Stretch I think.  Some casual observations:
- There's a lot of gibberish scrolling by during startup.  Am I supposed to be reading this?  I see occasional warnings, missing stuff, etc.  If there's a problem, how would I diagnose it?
- This thing hasn't booted in forever, I'm sure it's in need of updates.  Hmm, nothing seems to be going automatically though.  And I don't see a "update OS" button in the settings manager, or whatever I can tell are the nearest equivalents of that.  Matter of fact, I don't see an "update" on ANY application at all.  How, uh... just how secure is this supposed to be if there's no updates for anything, ever, anywhere..?
- I'd like to do some simple embedded dev on this thing.  Okay, so I need my toolchain.  Code::Blocks is cross platform, no problem there.  I guess it's not available via package manager, so download it.
- The files don't... "run".  They're just .deb archives.  What do?
- Okay, so almost everything pipes through apt-get, or similar package managers.  Oh also dpkg is what runs the .deb's.  Surely -- surely -- there would be a simple GUI wrapper for these, that's obviously titled, and prominently placed on the system menu?  I guess there's reason why xterm is prominently placed, but... c'mon... seriously?  Fuck is the point of booting up X if I have to memorize every magic incantation anyway?

And none of which are discoverable or obvious, so it's all searching for what to do.  Maybe there's mans on the HDD already, I don't know.  For sure, no one suggests looking at them.  Google is the holy oracle of all.  Good thing the Wifi connection "Just Works".

Discoverability is such a manifestly important goal of UX.  There isn't a single video game in the top 100 that doesn't do this.  Lead the player/user into what they need, or are most likely to need.  And automate all the piddling work for them.  (Or don't, depending on what kind of game it is; but generally, users aren't coming to an OS to play gnuClicker or whatever the equivalent would be.)

So I run some apt-get updates, upgrades, start getting some things installed that I need.  We're like 6 hours in at this point.  Having trouble locating python.  I want version 3.8 specifically, so I know it's compatible with the toolchain on my desktop.  Nope, doesn't exist, it thinks I mean some postgresql bullshit.  Nearest I can tell, the default distro does not offer specific versions.  I find it on another one (a quick search turns up dozens of sources).  I enter it by name, no good.  It does suggest adding servers to my sources.list.  Seems straightforward enough, sudo a text editor, paste it in and go.

Also, all along the way there's confusion about dependencies.  Because why would anything be easy.  Apparently you have to --fix-missing and such, and also there's a -R to install a bunch of packages in a directory in the right order.

Anyway, I finally find python and get it installing.  Text box (less).  Some deep sounding (libc6) package has a critical security update so it won't install it for me.  Or the new version is incompatible with what else I have on here.  Fine?  Q out, process finishes.  Fine, I'll just get a new version of that I guess.  Hey, why isn't sudo working anymore?  Why isn't... anything working anymore?  Reboot, maybe it's just gotten confused.  Linux is supposed to be famous for changing out whole kernel modules at run time, I don't know why this should help, but y'know, computers?  Hmm, X isn't even coming up.  It blinks a bunch then gives up and stops.  Rebooting into the "advanced" and "recovery" options doesn't make a difference.  Look up how to get a console.  Won't even login with any usernames I know.  Did... did apt-get just fucking brick the whole goddamned computer?

So I booted into Win10 the next day, and in the span of a couple hours, got most everything installed, including Code::Blocks running avr-gcc on a successful build of a recent project.  Still a slow and bothersome process, but most of it Just Works(TM).  No package hell, Installer just does the one complete configuration it's made for.  Or just dump it in some folder somewhere and run it, who cares.  Most of all, the OS doesn't let me, just, you know, fucking delete system32, as they say.


So, all this just to explain:

Even for a user who has general knowledge about computer systems,

Linux is still a piece of shit.

I'm not asking for advice; I know what I'd need to do to fix that.  Maybe it can be fixed from Windows, maybe run an installer, maybe flash a USB bootdisk.  I don't know how much that's going to wipe, if it can patch whatever fucked up in the kernel, or if I have to go through all that torture again just to get back to where I was.  I know I can look up a hundred different resources to figure that out.  Which is part of the problem by the way -- there's as many configurations as there are PCs running the stuff.  The paradox of choice.  It's a very real UX problem, this time also with very real development costs.  And with liability for the user of potentially destroying their computer.

Venting?  Sure.  Asking for sympathy?  I mean, I wouldn't mind.  Asking for solutions?  I don't care.  But that's really the root of the problem: developers write Linux for developers.  They expect all their users to know all the magic incantations, to have an internet connection always handy to search things they don't, and to just debug or recompile the kernel if anything should go wrong.  What could be easier!

It's -- it's the marketplace of ideas.  It's free software.  Free ideas.  Some people like to make a big deal about "the marketplace of ideas", but what they conveniently leave off -- or ignore with a spiritual conviction as the case may be -- ideas aren't worth anything.  In the legal sense, this is, well, patently true: you can't patent an idea.  An implementation, an invention, something physical, sure.  (Well, that's rather wishy-washy these days, between relaxed rules, less review than ever, and including more and more junk like software patents.  But, the core idea at least, of the PTO, and actual practice in recent history.)  So too it goes, free software is worth all the bits it's written on.  Free software only attains any value when it has, not just a little buy-in from users, but a truly stupendous user base -- popular projects like Firefox and Chromium are commonly touted as examples, ignoring the fact that real money supports those projects (Chromium especially, for obvious reason), and ignoring the literal millions of side projects that various users have spun off from projects big and small, as well as created themselves.  None of which you can get your hopes up about; they should be treated as only what they are: pet projects, by and for, one or a few users, with no intent of fitness-for-purpose, merchantability, support, etc.  Quite literally, you get what you paid for.

So you'll excuse me if I complain of a little cognitive dissonance, when I see optimistic claims about things people don't even realize they're extraordinarily biased towards.

Tim

[Doctorandus_P]

This Linux bashing is al lot of bollocks.

Debian is not a beginner friendly distribution. It never was, and it probably never will be.
Debian assumes you know what you're doing.
I'm not even sure if Debian "out of the box" is supposed to be used at all.
I see Debian more as a common root for more user friendly distributions.

My daily driver is Linux Mint, and it does have an update button.
Some time ago I re-started an old PC I had not used for a few years.
Just out of curiousity I tried to update with apt, and got into dependency hell.
I did not want to spend time on this, and almost wiped the SSD, then I thought of the Update Manager in Mint, and I ran it.
It solved all the dependency hell and got that old system running faultless.
It did need one or two reboots and restarts of the update manager but that's all.

About windoze...
A few years ago I was at a funeral and someone was doing a talk which got rudely interrupted because the PC which was giving a presentation on a beamer had to reboot itself because of a printer driver update.

A brother of mine had to baby sit an 6 hour CNC job because the PC wanted to reboot itself every half hour.

But in the end it's not the software which is to blame, but he people who are (ab) -using it.

And also the people who write the software in the first place.
I have not forgotten nor forgiven the FUD, smear campaigns and other anti-competitive behavior of microsoft, intel and a bunch of other "big companies"

In my end work for graduating from school I wasted several weeks because microsoft's idea of FTP was not compatible with RFC959.
It did force me to dive real deep into the FTP protocol back then (30 -odd years ago), and that was probably one of the moments that made me fall in love with Open source software.
It's not only the good they're trying to do. It's also the absence of malice which unfortunately rules in a lot of for-profit companies.

[nctnico]

This Linux bashing is al lot of bollocks.

Agreed. Every piece of software has a learning curve. Most people forget the amount of time they put into learning Windows and on top of that expect all operating systems to behave that way.

Try to switch CAD packages for example; suddenly all the 'muscle memory' is useless and the new package is total crap. Until you learn how to work with it... and only then you can have a valid opinion on which is better / worse at specific points.

[PlainName]

The thing about Windows is that there wasn't an alternative at the time. Maybe OS/2, but my experience of that was quite poor (and Microsoft deliberately broke its compatibility). Pretty much any GUI would be cool compared to a CLI. Nowadays, if you're switching away from Windows there is always the comparison with the known slick (and despite its faults, Windows is slick) example with, as you say, years or decades of muscle memory invested (although that's not translated to W10/11 so well, I think). Linux, and the Mac, have a much harder job now in converting foreign users than Windows did.

[tooki]

This Linux bashing is al lot of bollocks.

Agreed. Every piece of software has a learning curve. Most people forget the amount of time they put into learning Windows and on top of that expect all operating systems to behave that way.

Nah, the problems with Linux usability on the desktop go WAY beyond unfamiliarity. The open source model simply doesn’t lend itself towards user interface consistency, which is extremely important. This is where the Mac shines, Windows is OK, and Linux sucks.

CAD software is a genre which, regardless of platform, also generally sucks in this regard.

The thing about Windows is that there wasn't an alternative at the time.

***coughs in Macintosh***

Just what exactly do you think Windows was copying (poorly)?

Linux, and the Mac, have a much harder job now in converting foreign users than Windows did.

Having in the past sold literally hundreds of Macs to people converting from Windows (they were about 90% of our customers), it’s honestly not a huge problem for most people. The best advice I gave ”switchers” (based on what prior successful switchers had told me) was to simply “forget how you’d learned to do it on Windows, and instead just do what would make sense if you’d never used a computer”. The people who struggled were the few who expected everything to work exactly the same as Windows, which of course it doesn’t. (These were folks who had never gained any understanding of what they were doing, but rather just repeated their workflows by rote memory. I’m sure Windows 10/11 are giving them similar issues.)

Another cornerstone of a successful transition, of course, is application familiarity: Word, Excel and PowerPoint on Mac work basically the same as Word, Excel and PowerPoint on Windows. A browser is a browser. (And that already covers 90% of what most people do on computers these days…) But the same applied to users of various commercial software packages like Adobe stuff.

This doesn’t translate to Linux, because the Linux ecosystem doesn’t have that much in the way of commercial software packages, and even fewer of them are cross-platform. So users aren’t only experiencing a new OS interface, but the new-to-them open source applications, too, which may or may not even do the same things as their old one did.


People who don’t truly, thoroughly understand the ramifications of the whole user experience (the usability of the OS, usability of apps, the user interface consistency within and between apps, availability of apps, and the ecosystem more broadly) will never understand why Mac and Windows have been so successful on the desktop, and nothing else has. The typical Linux defenders show in their responses that they still don’t understand these things, which is why Linux’s desktop market share has been basically unchanged forever. (Heck, even most Windows people don’t understand them fully, which is why they never understood why Apple continued to be successful even as so-called “analysts” predicted the company’s demise.)

Did Microsoft do some unsavory things back in the day? Yes. But that really only affected Apple, and even that effect is probably not as big as people think. (I think most of Apple’s woes in the late 80s through the 90s were self-inflicted.) Nobody else was a meaningful competitor. OS/2 is the only platform I think might have stood a chance, had it not been for Microsoft’s monopolistic behaviors.


I mean, if there’s one software company that really gets me angry these days, it’s Adobe… (No, I won’t ever forgive them for buying Macromedia and then just killing off FreeHand, which was so much better than Illustrator in so many ways. But also how they used InDesign to — rightfully — lure away Quark Xpress’s entire customer base with a better product and great customer service, only to turn around once they’d gotten on top and become even more abusive than Quark had been to its customers!!)

[PlainName]

    The thing about Windows is that there wasn't an alternative at the time.

***coughs in Macintosh***

Just what exactly do you think Windows was copying (poorly)?

OK, an affordable alternative

At the time the Mac was a bit nichey. Didn't Microsoft have to bail them out at one point just so Microsoft wouldn't be a monopoly?

[tooki]

    The thing about Windows is that there wasn't an alternative at the time.

***coughs in Macintosh***

Just what exactly do you think Windows was copying (poorly)?

OK, an affordable alternative

At the time the Mac was a bit nichey.

Yes and no. Mostly yes, but at the time, they had REALLY cornered the publishing, multimedia, photography, music, and TV/film industries. Back then, you never saw a newspaper or magazine laid out on anything but Macs. Practically all professional media production was on the Mac back then. That’s really changed today, where a significant percentage of that is done on Windows.

What’s interesting to me, though, is that back then, when media production was absolutely dominated by Macs, very little of the business outside of media production was done on Macs. So you’d typically see big companies use Windows for everything, except for their art departments using Macs. Nowadays, the art departments might use Windows, but you also see lots of Macs in businesses outside of the art departments, having found their way into general office/business use a lot more. (Thanks, web/intranet apps!!)

Didn't Microsoft have to bail them out at one point just so Microsoft wouldn't be a monopoly?

Yes except actually no. Microsoft’s $150M investment in Apple was purely symbolic, to cement a big deal between the two companies: 1. a patent cross-licensing agreement (to put to bed, once and for all, the IP litigation between them), and 2. Microsoft’s promise to continue to make Mac versions of Office and Internet Explorer for 5 years. Contrary to what people often say, this investment was not needed for Apple’s survival (the company was worth billions at the time and was liquid*), and moreover, it wasn’t a cash investment, but a stock purchase. It didn’t make any tangible difference in Apple’s liquidity, but did serve to stabilize the stock price. Thus, it really cannot be called a bailout.

What’s hilarious is the way the Macworld Expo (Boston, 1997) crowd booed Bill G. when Jobs put him on the screen by satellite to announce this during the Apple keynote!

Appleinsider did a nice retrospective on it, including the video of the above: https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/08/06/august-6-1997----the-day-apple-and-microsoft-made-peace



*At the end of FY97, while the company did post a massive net loss (around $1B), the company had $4.3B in assets, including $1.2B in cash, and less than $1B of long-term debt. Heck, its market cap was just $2.3B, less than its assets! Ultimately, during the roughly 15 years (~1990-2005ish) that pundits kept predicting/announcing Apple’s imminent demise, and then once it became clear even to the dumbest of them that Apple was financially extremely stable, the few more years that they kept predicting/announcing the imminent crash of their stock price (“what goes up must come down, and it’s overpriced now!” 🤣), Apple only posted an annual net loss in two fiscal years: 1996 and 1997.

[free_electron]

one of the big problems that both linux and windows have is that they have to cater to too many hardware permutations. MacOs doesn't have that. they control the hardware and need to maintain only a limited set of drivers.

Oh , i have a 50 year old isa card for a 8 pin  dot matrix printer i want to use under windows 11. yup we have a driver for that.
oh i have a 30 year old Kodak single speed cd rom reader over a special oki plugin card .. have driver
oh, i have a 20 year old 640x480 vga webcam .. have driver

Apple goes : time to recycle your junk. here, have iForkoverhtemoney 14. its the best we made ever.

Windows 11 may solve some of it. Don't have prerequisite hardware ? sod off !
i hear you. yes you have to upgrade, yes it costs money, yes there's privacy yadda .. but if it makes the system more reliable and stable .. why are you complaining ? That was your main gripe no ? that it is unstable ?
So many bugs and security problems are caused by OLD SHIT lingering along. What was the latest one the found in linux ? a bug in a 20 year old library ? or was it 30 years old.  "oh, but you have the sourcecode" .What good is having the sourcecode if NOBODY READS IT !
they found the bug first, then traced it in the source. it's not like someone was reading the source and found it.

i have a whole library with every possible book written about electronics. i've never read any of them. i still blow up led's because i don't know what a resistor is. in fact i can't read, i just like to look at the pictures. some books i don't like cause they don't have pictures... but i still own the book so i can show off my collection to others.

THAT is the problem we are faced with. yes, apple is a walled garden but their shit works better because they control the hardware.
I'm not an apple fanboy.
- I have 3 pc's. one light for traveling , pictures etc, 2 portable workstations. all run windows 10 which can run the programs i use in life.

- i have a mac ( late 2010. faster than my latest windows laptop. try running Davinci resolve video editor. it works better on the old mac than it does on the 2 year old AMD ryzen laptop.. ). The mac is used for anything deemed safety critical : banking etc .. there is no way in hell i would access a bank website from windows.

- i have an iPhone. why ? because android is a pile of shit packaged in another pile of shit. I started with android. nothing but misery. this application can only run on that machine, this thing doesn;t scale properly, the user interface isn;t "smooth". scrolling is jerky. lollipop hasn't been ported to your hardware yet and other drivel. i had a phone ( googles red pixel first gen ) , an Asus tablet, a Coby tablet, a repackaged coby sold as honeywell for the alarm ( cause the honeywell app could only run on the modded tablet ) and a samsung tablet. nothing worked right. applications that would run on one device didn't work on another. they all ran different versions of android becasue the manufacturers couldn't update the distros in time. it all ended up in the trash can. i bought an iphone and that was it. iphone 4 was my first one. then i got an 8 , now i have an X. i am thinking about 13 but will probably wait till later this year to see what 14 brings (if it gets that 40+ megapixel camera i will bite, if not i might keep my X for another year ). i also have a first generation ipad pro.

I use windows. Why ? Because it runs the software i use and am familiar with. I Grew up with it, invested time and money learning. Not because i "like" it. An operating systems job is to let programs run. Other than that i needs to get out of my way. So far macOs and Windows cover everything i want/need. I'm done relearning everything. i want to get shit done.

My hacking days stopped with windows XP. i grew up with CP/M and dos and could write TSR's like the best. I had a licensed version of Turbo assembler. I coded an I/O driver for windows NT that ran in kernel mode so you could control home-brew hardware. It let you do peek/poke an in/out operations from userland. Written in assmbler, embedded in a turbo pascal generated DLL that could be called from visual basic , or C or whatever.

Now ? i don't care about any of that anymore. My days of making screwdrivers are over. I have a whole set. If i need a new one i will buy it.

Linux ? I Don't feel the need to learn the noble art of iron ore digging, smelting, blacksmithery to forge the steel shaft and becoming a lumberjack and woodturner to make the handle so i can lovingly create a screwdriver. ( meanwhile visiting all possible forums and having heated discussions about where to dig the best ore , what hammer to use in the forge and if oak is better than teakwood for the handle. )
I have dabbled with linux when it still came on a single 1.44Mb floppy... version 0.28 i believe. And then install 19 floppies with X-windows to drool over x-eyes . two stupid circles that followed your mouse cursor. in monochrome on 800x600 on a 386DX running at 35MHz with 2 megs of ram. It was all bedazzling as a 19 year old when windows 2.0 was top notch. Sadly i never found any software it could run. None of my dos programs could run. The same is still (partially) true in 2022. None of the windows programs run on linux (natively) or macOS. or vice versa.

Here is a question : why do the operating systems need to be so different they cant run applications ? after all it is still the same processor and the same instruction set. the CPU doesn't care.
We are spending all this effort to do the same thing , just different. how stupid is that ?

- I'll build a road here so i can drive a car to there. i built roads since the beginning of the industry. the first ones could only support pedestrians but you got there in the end. you can still walk if you want. my road is compatible with shoes.

- Some other guy goes "i don't like your road". Let me also build a road to get to the same place. it will be built differently and cars made for your road cannot run on my road natively. there is a trailer that you can put your car on that is towed by another vehicle. the trailer may break or not be able to handle the weight of your car. Drivers will constantly argue about colors , left or right hand driving , and diesel vs gasoline. Cars come with a bucket of asphalt and a manual so you can fill your own potholes. But if you alter the asphalt in any way you have to share the recipe. Others may dig up the pothole again to put their asphalt in. You can walk , or even crawl on your elbows if you wanted. Just be wary of the glass shards, splinters and ravenous bugblatter beast of traal along the way. Just close your eyes when you encounter one of those.

- A third one builds a super fancy road that can only run electric cars sold by him or a very select few. we don't want any plebeiians on our roads (and we certainly will not walk.) . have a (at extra cost of course) flower to sniff as you are being driven to your destination. Sorry, no walking here.

Meanwhile .. i want to get to that destination ! and we razed the forest to build three roads... pure idiocy

[Ed.Kloonk]

Here is a question : why do the operating systems need to be so different they cant run applications ? after all it is still the same processor and the same instruction set. the CPU doesn't care.
We are spending all this effort to do the same thing , just different. how stupid is that ?

To answer your question, you have to understand something about business law. Dos/Windows only exists because the law requires that you must make enough significant changes for software to do, yes, essentially the same thing but not so similar to be sued for copyright.

When you weigh up every good design feature and aspect about Unix and compare how it was later implemented in dos/windows you start to notice how inferior it is as a whole. And how pointless it is.

[coppice]

Here is a question : why do the operating systems need to be so different they cant run applications ? after all it is still the same processor and the same instruction set. the CPU doesn't care.
We are spending all this effort to do the same thing , just different. how stupid is that ?

The instruction set doesn't care, but everything else does. A few user->system APIs are clearly dumb, but most differences are a design choice that its advocates can make a good argument for, and detractors can make a good argument against. With "the right way" of doing things not being clear, its not appropriate to force every system to work the same way and be compatible. Fudge layers, like WINE allowing a Linux machine to run a range of Windows apps, exist, but are always a compromise. Various cross platform toolkits allow an application developer to pay very little attention to the different systems, except for the areas where the special qualities of each system make a real difference to the particular application. For most simple applications, which do nothing exotic with the system they run on, people overplay just how different the various modern systems are, and how much extra work it takes to be cross-platform. The problems usually arise from people buying into development tools that are tied to one particular system, which are then a huge PITA to port to other systems.

[nctnico]

Meanwhile .. i want to get to that destination ! and we razed the forest to build three roads... pure idiocy

No, it isn't. It is more like bycicle roads, highways and train tracks. Each type of transport needs their own type of infrastructure. Linux, OSx and Windows each cater to a different kind of use / user. They aren't interchangeable.

[Gribo]

Good luck using that 40 years old ISA card without specialized drivers & VM. Windows stopped supporting direct IO for ages. But, on the other hand, that HPIB instrument? Yep, plug it into that USB GPIB adapter, and start working.
Windows does have binary compatibility with WinAPI applications - you can run a windows 3.0 app, as long as it was properly written (no direct HW access, no DOS calls).

[PlainName]

yes you have to upgrade, yes it costs money, yes there's privacy yadda .. but if it makes the system more reliable and stable .. why are you complaining ?

Well, that's the problem. It's less reliable and stable, plus it's a worse user interface. Why on Earth would anyone willingly move to it?

[Karel]

Linux is designed by engineers for engineers.
Windows is designed for gamers and housewives.
 

[free_electron]

Linux is designed by engineers for engineers.
Windows is designed for gamers and housewives.
 

engineers. lol. so they can drive a locomotive.

[free_electron]

Here is a question : why do the operating systems need to be so different they cant run applications ? after all it is still the same processor and the same instruction set. the CPU doesn't care.
We are spending all this effort to do the same thing , just different. how stupid is that ?

The instruction set doesn't care, but everything else does. A few user->system APIs are clearly dumb, but most differences are a design choice that its advocates can make a good argument for, and detractors can make a good argument against. With "the right way" of doing things not being clear, its not appropriate to force every system to work the same way and be compatible.

that's what the BIOS used to be fore. that was your lowest level API.  Read sector, write sector , read byte, write byte.
It is essentially what Apple did with the lisa and early mac's. The hardcoded roms provided a base layer of operations .
if we had a common base layer that could do things like ' open file , read file , write file close file. give me a chunk of memory. give me a window. then the OS would just be "paint". The cores are the same.

Essentially a virtual machine that exposes a bare minimum. you can get a chunk of memory and you can get a canvas to draw on ( screen, printer , doesn't matter ) . "Drivers" would be elements that work at the VM level and translate the "canvas" to hardware ( video card ) or output ( PDF , postscript , pcl . whatnot )

You don't need a bazillion functions.
file access (open close read write create delete file/directory , select source (local/remote doesn't matter. its unified . everything accessed through GUID)
Give me window to draw on. you cannot step outside this window. base functions to draw lines and whatnot.
Programs at startup get a chunk of memory and can request/release more if needed. They cannot step outside their chunk.

Programs are installed in a single container. They don't vomit their stuff all over the place. no shared libraries. disk space is cheap. if application x needs version y of a library it is in its container. if application z needs another version : it can be found in its container.
i hear you buzzing : but but security updates and patches in libraries : up to the application manufacturer to release a new package. This approach will force them to keep things up to date.

so many times programs have quirks because some shared dll got updated and there is now some weird incompatibility.

There are operating systems that can do this. iRMX can do it. ok, now it is no longer compatible with new stuff cause it isn't being maintained but i have seen machines that ran iRMX with dos in one container, windows 2.0 in another , wind 3.11 in another and win95 in yet another. and native iRMX applications in their own container. In the waferfab we had expensive ion implantation machines that ran iRMX. When you needed to open a valve there was a button drawn on the touchscreen. that button was a small irmx application that lived in its own space and could only control that valve. that application could not step outside of its container.

If you think about it this is nothing but system virtualisation.

If you look at linux : there are what 300 different flavors of the darn thing. And what makes them different ? eye-candy ! the core functions are the same. but the eye candy difference are large enough that applications are not always runnable.
Its a headache both for users and coders as they need to maintain compatibility with all these little things.

The PC was a clever idea. here is a hardware box that has a bios. you interface with this thing to operate the machine. int21 got you almost anything you wanted.
why can't they create such a thing at a higher level. then it wouldn't matter. applications would work no matter what as they would contain everything needed.

Anyway, i'm at the point in my life where i don't care anymore. Like i said : if it gets the job done its fine with me. The less effort needed on my side the better. i don't want to constantly learn new things, debug someone's source code. if that means i need to pay Microsoft or apple 100$ for a license. so be it. Linux isn't free either. it takes time. The effort in time needed on my part is valued much more than 100$. We live a finite amount of time. i'm past my halfway point. There's places i want to see and stuff i wan to do. learning yet another os is not on my list.

[free_electron]

Meanwhile .. i want to get to that destination ! and we razed the forest to build three roads... pure idiocy

No, it isn't. It is more like bycicle roads, highways and train tracks. Each type of transport needs their own type of infrastructure. Linux, OSx and Windows each cater to a different kind of use / user. They aren't interchangeable.

you are comparing apples with pears.

i'm talking desktop and desktop only. windows, macos, linux, solaris , BeOs , whatever in all their non-server versions.
They all do similar things : they expose a filing system and abstract a bunch of hardware and provide an API to applications. And they expose an interface to the user in the form of a graphics system.

The user runs applications.
I don't give a rats ass how the "close" button is handled internally or what shape it is. as long as every applications uses the same close button. not one program that has a button top left, another that has a button bottom right. uniformity. file open menu is the same for every applications. Learn it once.

I want to do work. work for which i need applications. applications that run on hardware . that "operating system" is only an abstraction layer between hardware and applications. It should be invisible to the user.
Now there are different abstraction layers that are incompatible with each other. the whole point of an abstraction layer is to make things uniform.

I find this weird. just me being me i guess.

[nctnico]

Meanwhile .. i want to get to that destination ! and we razed the forest to build three roads... pure idiocy

No, it isn't. It is more like bycicle roads, highways and train tracks. Each type of transport needs their own type of infrastructure. Linux, OSx and Windows each cater to a different kind of use / user. They aren't interchangeable.

you are comparing apples with pears.

No, not at all. Forget about desktop versus server. I spend quite some time developing embedded software which I really wouldn't want to do on Windows. First of all many of the targets I work with run Linux and secondly running a compiler on Linux compiles software a whole lot faster than Windows. A decent sized embedded microcontroller project takes minutes to compile on Windows versus tens of seconds on Linux (using the same PC, same compiler and same number of parallel threads). And there are many other computing tasks where Linux works much better for me compared to using Windows.  Windows simply isn't the right tool for the job I do because it gets in the way of productivity.

[free_electron]

Meanwhile .. i want to get to that destination ! and we razed the forest to build three roads... pure idiocy

No, it isn't. It is more like bycicle roads, highways and train tracks. Each type of transport needs their own type of infrastructure. Linux, OSx and Windows each cater to a different kind of use / user. They aren't interchangeable.

you are comparing apples with pears.

No, not at all. Forget about desktop versus server. I spend quite some time developing embedded software which I really wouldn't want to do on Windows. First of all many of the targets I work with run Linux and secondly running a compiler on Linux compiles software a whole lot faster than Windows. A decent sized embedded microcontroller project takes minutes to compile on Windows versus tens of seconds on Linux (using the same PC, same compiler and same number of parallel threads). And there are many other computing tasks where Linux works much better for me compared to using Windows.  Windows simply isn't the right tool for the job I do because it gets in the way of productivity.

so linux plays well when linux is the target. got it.
Code writing is only one thing.

Let me give you an example of what i mean with "stupidity".

I need to get a document form my mortgage company to give to my tax preparer.
fire up a web browser , accept cookies ... download the document . it save this in the downloads folder as q573612_44837.pdf
double click the document to open in acrobat. acrobat wants to update. check document is filled out properly , save document as mortgage_statement_2021.pdf , throw it in "tax documents 2021" folder.
go back to browser. access tax preparer website. find upload button , go find the damn file ( by default it opens on to desktop , which is not where i stored the file) wait fo r it to upload.

why can i not just speak into the microphone like in start trek ? computer, get the mortgage tax document from the bank and send it to luke at the tax preparation office. save a copy in my tax 2012 folder.
Many programs these days use different file selection interfaces. We have a whole range of web browser out there that all use webkit as a core. why ?
can we standardize this stuff so we don;t have to rel-learn it every time.

ApplE fucked up big time in their last update. the search bar in the browser on an iphone was always at the top. now it is at the bottom. this irritates me to no end. i can't even be bothered to find out how to move it. i prefer being irritated over its position than being irritated on how to figure out to move it.

user interfaces these days SUCK! i had a rental car two weeks ago. a KIA niro. nice car. but the user interface ? my god what a button fest ... the steering wheel had like 30 buttons, 4 scroll / click / sideclick wheel. The two control stalks had so many functions they ran out of space to put texts on them to tell you what they did. The touchschreen has soft buttons to select radio , camera, gps AND hard buttons underneath that do EXACTLY THE SAME FUNCTION as the touch zones on the display ! what drunken idiot designed that ?
And then the GPS insisted i enter a destination by city first, then street, then number. i don't know any of that. i needed the Hilton hotel. Just let me scroll the map from where i am. I know its the closest one to the airport here. why can't i just type in  "Hilton" ?

now, back to your compiler. I really doubt this is an operating system issue. this is a compiler issue. You say it the same compiler runs on windows and linux. that in itself is impossible. linux cannot run windows binaries and vice versa. It may be the same "product" from the same "company" , but it is NOT the same binary. if it runs that much slower on one OS versus another there is a problem in the application. It's more optimized for one platform than another.

what does that compiler do ? take a chunk of text and translate it into opcodes. This is all done in memory with some disk access for files. You can't tell me that linux is that much faster for memory allocation/deallocation and disk i/o than windows. Differences , yes. a few percent here and there. Same for threading. That is not possible. but minutes to tens of seconds ? that is not the OS fault. that is an application issue. it is just not written right for that OS.  Or they use an emulation layer. This thing is developed natively for linux API. it runs on windows using a Linux to windows translation api. it is not native to windows. This leads me back to my earlier statement : why don't we have a common API that every OS uses. Actually we would not need an 'operating system' as such.

After all .. what is an operating system ? a core that does file and memory i/o and graphics. anything else is an application.
file browser ? application.
web browser ? application .
printer control panel ? application

The core should handle connectivity and device access in a standardized way. applications don't get to do that. There would be one core and one core only. I like the clipboard program from suse, the printer finder from microsoft , the file browser from apple. They are all compiled for a PC so they can run.

There would be no duplication of effort and we could select the bits and pieces we liked. Competition would be purely on the abilities of the applications (for software) and the speed of the hardware (for hardware vendors.). Now we're stuck in a situation where i need a windows machine for this, a linux machine for that and an apple box for something else.
Applications should run in single containers. Each app has its own world.. if i buy a new computer : move the application container to the new hardware. no more need for installers. an application should be a single file with an embedded file system. myprogram.app -> an encapsulated file system that contains everything needed to run this thing. user settings are saved to this container as well. or you could do myprogram.settings.<user>

Applications do not get to paint their own buttons and user interface elements. those are handled by the UI. the application requests a viewport ,in this vieport there is a button x long by y high with the text "Ok" in it. the UI application decides how it is actually painted, font and whatnot. Enforced uniformity.

if i look at my pc: I use a certain look and feel, but many programs bring their own look and button style . Some even have different looking close buttons. this is madness. the computer is set up with a specific color scheme that suits me (i'm colorblind so i use my own color scheme) and font size and whatnot. Half of the programs bring their own look and feel that is so far off and not adjustable to this UI style. It is irritating ! One program uses this font as default in that size, another uses another font in a different size. one is dark mode, the other is light mode . These things need to be global settings with no overriding ability from inside an application.

Now every time i buy a new computer i spend hours loading it with everything i want. in this case : just copy the .app files over. everything travels with it. settings and all.

i'm amazed that in 2022 we still have to put in so much effort for things that can be solved in a simple way. In fact, these things are not new. it used to be like that under dos and cp/m and many older 'systems'. zip the folder , copy unzip. done.

[tooki]

You don't need a bazillion functions.
file access (open close read write create delete file/directory , select source (local/remote doesn't matter. its unified . everything accessed through GUID)
Give me window to draw on. you cannot step outside this window. base functions to draw lines and whatnot.
Programs at startup get a chunk of memory and can request/release more if needed. They cannot step outside their chunk.

You don’t have the foggiest notion what operating systems actually do, then. If our operating systems did only what you propose (ignoring the fact that there are many, many ways to do those same things), we’d be going back to the operating systems of the 1960s-70s.

Networking as we know it? Gone. Internet? Gone. Drag and drop? Gone. A desktop? Gone. Standardized UI elements? Gone. Printing anything but monospace text? Gone. Sound? Gone. Inexpensive software? Gone. Peripheral support? Gone. Those things all work BECAUSE we have these “fat” operating systems running on top of the kernel, which is basically all you’ve proposed. Those fat layers make it possible to develop software quickly (and thus cheaply), have compatibility between programs, and have greater software stability (and usability) because developers aren’t wasting their time reinventing the wheel over and over again.

So yes, our OSes have a “bazillion” functions and that’s a decidedly good thing!!!!

[T3sl4co1l]

Talk about missing the point...

I got the impression from that comment that, basically we could return to the days of the "dumb terminal", but a bit smarter.  I mean, there's still a few smart terminals these days, netbooks, etc.  But from a somewhat different tack: there's quite some justification for doing it this way:
- What with how incredibly powerful browsers are these days;
- And consider the walled gardens (albeit they're low walls, depending) of say mobile phone ecosystems, with an app store to select software, which doesn't even run natively on the machine anyway;
- We could just make the browser the OS instead.

It's like... shades of MS integrating IE into Win9x, but going entirely the other way around, integrating an OS into the browser.  Right?

You've got free directory services.  Just view file:/// as FTP directories from browser-internal templates.  Add some POST functionality, drag-and-drop actions, etc. and there you go, a fully functional file manager.  Make local pages a bit richer in permissions, and you've got file system protections, XSS protection, etc.

Layout of apps is relatively trivial; no need for layout managers, specify everything in CSS/HTML/JS.  Maybe you'd want something a bit tighter than JS, fine, but also JS is the de facto web standard so you're going to have a damn hard time removing it.  Or like how e.g. Android stuff is built on Java (as I understand it??), so it's not even native, it's JIT or interpreted (as is JS).

No shortage of languages and development possible.  If we include WebAssembly, it'll handle basically any binary compatible with that interface; lots of things can be transpiled to JS, Java or WA; and in the worst case, things can be compiled to ARM/x86 and virtualized/emulated as needed.

And so you can very well have something like ye olde BASIC ROM, but instead of LOAD "*",8,1 it's a proper graphical interface with both a local file system and internet connectivity; and instead of the lingua franca being BASIC, it's the richness that we expect and demand in modern times: a fully featured JS, or Java, or Python, or whatever console/environment you like.

Which, to bring it back a bit -- the mention of having a canvas to draw on and do whatever with, is basically this (plus reading into it a bit, in terms of supporting features).  Modern OSs, and the web services they run in turn, are modeled on fairly standard visual objects, -- object orientation at that -- and built-in compositing.  You don't need to draw a fuckin' combo box, you can instantiate one and let the OS handle it.

So I find it very believable that we could have an OS, which does basically the things we expect of it, and that is divorced from much of the historical baggage, the questionable backwards compatibilities that all of them suffer (Win/DOS and *nix); and that supports, at a fairly basic level, all the rich features we expect -- and no more, and no less, anything extra being defined by apps.

And that's a pipe dream of course; such a thing will not gain widespread adoption, not very quickly at least.  But as dreaming of pipes go -- it's one of the more believable ones, and I can see how it might go.

I'm not too familiar with Android, or iOS for that matter, how they're structured (aside from a linux-y core?) and what they can do; it seems to me, there's about four major things missing here:

Input - KB&M support, and just generally all the things we expect to be able to use.  Game controllers, but also more special-purpose devices.  Mobile devices are optimized for touch, which is neither very rich nor precise.  Some phones do let you use KB/M via USB/BT, but app support probably isn't great..?  Conversely, PC apps are rarely(?) made for touch, so, point in case, there's a big divide between these extremes.

Output - big monitors, multiple monitors, more powerful GPUs (granted, they're startlingly powerful already these days), just, more IO in general -- just, bulkier things, expansion slots over USB ports, say.  It's hard to imagine a cell phone plugged into a 2k+ display, let alone typical apps being any kind of useful at such scale and resolution.  And, like -- networking, hard drives, etc. can be connected by radio, sure, even at quite competitive bandwidths these days, but there's something to be said for wired connections -- no need to pollute the airwaves, or risk potential snooping of your data in transit.

Purpose - mobile devices are hand-held, you can't exactly do dev work on them, or much of anything professional aside from showing off or taking pix/vids, and making phone calls.  Arguably driven by the above point, but arguably the converse is true, that interfaces are driven by purpose instead, too!

Security - mobile devices are relatively locked down, for several good (and not so good) reasons.  The imagined OS should be more flexible to support a more desktop-like model, while still observing important isolation and security features.  Which might be a good justification to not actually offer truly universal drag-and-drop (as has been the dream since the 60s, alas).

Or about the example of narrating one's intent -- even given a ~100% accurate speech interpreter, the computer needs to know that you're even authorized to do those things, let alone to know how to do all of them when none of those documents (randomly named tax doc scan, tax doc submission field, etc.) are tagged as such.  (Such schemas might exist -- although the closest I see on schema.org offhand is taxID, hardly descriptive enough here.  Probably one would have to consult a much richer knowledge system to have enough information types to be able to handle these sorts of things -- and in turn, the ability to parse and recognize a document as being of such-and-such a type, and the webpage offering/being capable of receiving such data as well.  Which, I mean, it's a big hurdle, but it's also one that's fairly well explored these days, and could be harnessed to facilitate applications like this.)

Tim

[free_electron]

You don't need a bazillion functions.
file access (open close read write create delete file/directory , select source (local/remote doesn't matter. its unified . everything accessed through GUID)
Give me window to draw on. you cannot step outside this window. base functions to draw lines and whatnot.
Programs at startup get a chunk of memory and can request/release more if needed. They cannot step outside their chunk.

You don’t have the foggiest notion what operating systems actually do, then. If our operating systems did only what you propose (ignoring the fact that there are many, many ways to do those same things), we’d be going back to the operating systems of the 1960s-70s.

Networking as we know it? Gone. Internet? Gone. Drag and drop? Gone. A desktop? Gone. Standardized UI elements? Gone. Printing anything but monospace text? Gone. Sound? Gone. Inexpensive software? Gone. Peripheral support? Gone. Those things all work BECAUSE we have these “fat” operating systems running on top of the kernel, which is basically all you’ve proposed. Those fat layers make it possible to develop software quickly (and thus cheaply), have compatibility between programs, and have greater software stability (and usability) because developers aren’t wasting their time reinventing the wheel over and over again.

So yes, our OSes have a “bazillion” functions and that’s a decidedly good thing!!!!

not true. anything you have described are applications.
- networking ? nothing but remote data access. data that resides in remote storage, is read , parsed and visualised or stored on local storage. Hey operating system , fetch me index.html at www.google.com
- internet ? see above. nothing but remote file reading
- drag and drop ? nothing but an application that tells the os to grab file x from location y and move it to location z. drag and drop for other objects ? window manager telling application object x has moved from location y to location z. do something.
- desktop ? no difference.
- standardized ui elements : part of the os window manager.

you are not sacrificing anything.
the problem is that today we have multiple of these 'standard' systems and they are all incompatible with each other !
it would be great if we could make applications that could completely run inside a browser. then the browser becomes the OS layer. at least that world is (sort of) standardised. doesn't matter if you us chrome , safari , or edge. the site works.

That is what i am talking about. i can pick the os with the look and feel i want and can run any application. applications are not tied to one OS.

[free_electron]

- We could just make the browser the OS instead.

exactly !. there are whole complex cad systems that run in-browser. doesn't matter if you are on mac, windows or linux or even solaris. have a modern browser ? it'll work. the hardware becomes abstract. the OS disappears.  a computer can run any application, irrespective of who made the hardware and the controlling ... eh should we call it firmware ? So now the whole ecosystem changes. The endless x better than y is purely based on speed of the box and the built in peripherals it brings.  the programs will run. the "computer" is now defined purely by the cpu speed, storage size , screen size etc.

[nctnico]

Talk about missing the point...

I got the impression from that comment that, basically we could return to the days of the "dumb terminal", but a bit smarter.  I mean, there's still a few smart terminals these days, netbooks, etc.  But from a somewhat different tack: there's quite some justification for doing it this way:
- What with how incredibly powerful browsers are these days;
- And consider the walled gardens (albeit they're low walls, depending) of say mobile phone ecosystems, with an app store to select software, which doesn't even run natively on the machine anyway;
- We could just make the browser the OS instead.

Something along that idea exists for a long time already (decades!). It is not called a browser but a graphical terminal. And it is used on a large scale even today although the name terminal has been replaced by 'thin client'. These are typically used where people need some custom application for data entry / reading and a glorified typewriter.

Additionally Google and Microsoft (AFAIK) also provide webbrowser-based document editing & sharing.

[tooki]

You don't need a bazillion functions.
file access (open close read write create delete file/directory , select source (local/remote doesn't matter. its unified . everything accessed through GUID)
Give me window to draw on. you cannot step outside this window. base functions to draw lines and whatnot.
Programs at startup get a chunk of memory and can request/release more if needed. They cannot step outside their chunk.

You don’t have the foggiest notion what operating systems actually do, then. If our operating systems did only what you propose (ignoring the fact that there are many, many ways to do those same things), we’d be going back to the operating systems of the 1960s-70s.

Networking as we know it? Gone. Internet? Gone. Drag and drop? Gone. A desktop? Gone. Standardized UI elements? Gone. Printing anything but monospace text? Gone. Sound? Gone. Inexpensive software? Gone. Peripheral support? Gone. Those things all work BECAUSE we have these “fat” operating systems running on top of the kernel, which is basically all you’ve proposed. Those fat layers make it possible to develop software quickly (and thus cheaply), have compatibility between programs, and have greater software stability (and usability) because developers aren’t wasting their time reinventing the wheel over and over again.

So yes, our OSes have a “bazillion” functions and that’s a decidedly good thing!!!!

not true. anything you have described are applications.
- networking ? nothing but remote data access. data that resides in remote storage, is read , parsed and visualised or stored on local storage. Hey operating system , fetch me index.html at www.google.com
- internet ? see above. nothing but remote file reading
- drag and drop ? nothing but an application that tells the os to grab file x from location y and move it to location z. drag and drop for other objects ? window manager telling application object x has moved from location y to location z. do something.
- desktop ? no difference.
- standardized ui elements : part of the os window manager.

you are not sacrificing anything.
the problem is that today we have multiple of these 'standard' systems and they are all incompatible with each other !
it would be great if we could make applications that could completely run inside a browser. then the browser becomes the OS layer. at least that world is (sort of) standardised. doesn't matter if you us chrome , safari , or edge. the site works.

That is what i am talking about. i can pick the os with the look and feel i want and can run any application. applications are not tied to one OS.

Just more confirmation that you do not know what OSes do and how they work.

No, networking is not just remote file fetch.

No, that’s not all drag and drop does.

You didn’t mention the window manager having a UI widget toolbox. You just said a blank window to draw lines in.

We already can run apps completely within a browser.

And finally, a common baseline means making HUGE sacrifices. It means devs are limited to the specific API calls common to all OSes. This is precisely why present-day cross-platform frameworks suck: you can’t use anything that isn’t present on ALL supported OSes. The Mac, for example, has a rich set of well-designed UI elements of which numerous are not available on other OSes.

So sorry, you don’t know what you’re talking about.