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by blablabla123 3098 days ago
Yes, and there are tons of research OSs. Most of them suffer from a lack of Hardware support. I'd be ready to switch to OpenBSD/Solaris/QNX/other fancy OS tomorrow if all my HW components were supported.

I doubt anything non-Linux based is ever becoming popular within the next 100 years. ;)
2 comments
Shoothe 3098 days ago
They don't need to replace Linux in one big event. They'll probably test and safely move some working ideas to their production OSes (similarly as Span was introduced in .NET from Midori).

There is also some effort in abstracting device drivers in Android (Project Treble) but how it could be used in Magenta is not clear.

Personally I'd be really interested in seeing this OS deployed in production. I like Linux but it's XXI century, we should be slowly adopting basic security principles in our OSes (capabilities, microkernels). But I fear that Magenta will look similar to Android, while it is open source Google will internally use a customized version that the customers will not be able to compile themselves.

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blablabla123 3097 days ago
Sure, it could be a process and Project Treble goes in the right direction.

However it's insane if you consider how many device drivers there are for Windows and Linux. The large majority of Linux kernel code is drivers. When you consider that Linux still has problems to run on certain hardware, then the problem becomes more obvious.

My bet is, in case this ever becomes a success, then only for a subset of vendors that are willing to cooperate closely with Google. (Oh yeah, and everybody needs to throw away the old hardware.)

I wished efforts would instead go into improving Linux Kernel. It reminds me of Google saying that JavaScript is a complete dead end and must be replaced. So they created Dart which surely has a great design but nobody uses it - and JS is now better than ever.

Moreover it's a bit of a lame excuse that vendors don't update their Android modifications. It already start that Google doesn't manage to get their Linux kernel modifications into the mainline Kernel - almost violating OpenSource principles...

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e1ven 3098 days ago
If you're manufacturing the hardware as well as the software , this is less of an issue.

Getting a new OS to run on a new cellphone, or laptop is a surmountable task.

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