[hnlmorg]

I don't see why we need to pretend that every hobby has the potential for greatness. Being a hobby is a good enough end to itself.

In fact in this instance I think it's a little disingenuous to quote Linux and say it could happen again. The industry is totally different now. There's much more competition than there was when Linux was released and that competition is much more mature too. Plus the bar for a production-quality kernel is a lot higher than it was when Linux was released.

[sennight]

> In fact in this instance I think it's a little disingenuous to quote Linux and say it could happen again.

Seems apropos to me, given the fact that a Linux ABI compatible hobby project is under discussion - and that everyone here is familiar with the famous Usenet announcement.

> The industry is totally different now. There's much more competition than there was when...

I wonder how you define "competition"? Because there were way more operating systems in use then, and the industry was far more fractured. Fractured in a way that was meaningful - not like today where you can spin up a VM and be productive in short order, thanks to the significant lack of distinguishing difference. That is the really interesting thing about these hobby projects - they introduce possibilities that are either completely ignored by organizations suffering from inertia constraints, or can't be mimicked because they're diametrically opposed to present designs.

[hnlmorg]

> I wonder how you define "competition"? Because there were way more operating systems in use then, and the industry was far more fractured.

There is way more competition now:

  + Linux (countless distributions)
  + FreeBSD
  + OpenBSD
  + NetBSD
  + DragonflyBSD
  + HardenedBSD
  + Darwin
  + Minix 3 (which wasn't free when Linux was released)
  + Illumos
  + OpenIndiana
  + Nexenta OS
  + SmartOS
  + ...and many others based off OpenSolaris / Illumos

This isn't even an exhaustive list of UNIX-like platforms that are new since Linux and free.

Don't conflate standardisation of the industry with a lack of options. More options do exist today and are in use (eg some games consoles run FreeBSD, Netflix uses BSD, Nexenta is used in some enterprise storage solutions, Darwin may not be used in any free capacity but macOS is clearly used heavily by HN readers, and so on and so forth).

Moreover, I've used FreeBSD, Solaris, OpenSolaris, Nexenta and OpenBSD on production systems over the last 10 years (and the list gets more esoteric if we look past 10 years). So just because you might exist in a Linux-only ecosystem it doesn't mean that's the case for the entire IT industry.

[sennight]

Odd, you purportedly know the difference between an OS and a distro - but that doesn't stop you from generating the above nonsense list. Just look at the last 5 items... seriously - all these Illumos derivatives are distinct operating systems in competition with one another? And to a degree that is no different from Netware vs OS/2?! Be serous, that list only further proves my point about the total lack of distinguishing difference in the present offerings - relative to the pre-linux environment.

> So just because you might exist in a Linux-only...

Obnoxiously presumptuous.

[hnlmorg]

> but that doesn't stop you from generating the above nonsense list.

lol it's not nonsense. Every item I've listed offers something unique.

> Just look at the last 5 items... seriously - all these Illumos derivatives are distinct operating systems in competition with one another?

Actually the differences in the Illumos derivatives are quite fundamental:

- Nexentra is aimed at being an enterprise storage solution with Debian user land. That's massively unlike Illumos

- Smart OS is designed to be a smarter virtualisation and containerisation host OS. It even bundles Linux's KVM virtualization. It's not intended to be run as a desktop platform

- OpenIndiana and Illumos are probably the most similar, however OpenIndiana aims to be more true to OpenSolaris while Illumos aims to be more of a hybrid upstream. So while they're both multi-paradigm (like how Debian can be a desktop or server OS) there are some major differences in their commit tree.

Honest question: how close are you to the Illumos projects? Or are you just an outsider looking in and making assumptions about equivalence based on your experience with Linux? I ask because Illumos forks are much more akin to BSD forks than they are Linux distros.

> Be serous, that list only further proves my point about the total lack of distinguishing difference in the present offerings - relative to the pre-linux environment.

Even if you want to pare down the list to upstreams, you still have half a dozen BSDs (I really hope you at least have enough experience with BSD to realise these aren't just respins like Linux distros), Illumos, Minix, and Darwin. Verses your point in the 90s which was basically non-free BSD, non-free SysV, non-free QNX, non-free Minix etc....you still have those options now PLUS the ones I've listed.

This is the problem with your argument. You're assuming the old choices have gone away, which they haven't...well, apart from SCO and Minix is now free. And in addition we have dozens of interesting new platforms, some of which I've exampled, too.

There's no way on Earth we have less choice now than in the 90s. We might have the industry largely standardising on a subset but that's an entirely different argument and it's only representative of the lowest common denominator doing common problems. However if you look slightly outside of the status quo and you'd see there is a lot of variety still happening in the industry. I know this first hand too -- as I've said in my previous post, I've worked in plenty of places that weren't just Linux shops :)

[sennight]

> Every item I've listed offers something unique.

You then go on to characterize components grafted in from another OS as "unique". That is a laughably low bar, making every potential permutation of existing operating system components distinct offerings in competition for mindshare.

> Honest question...

Honest answer: you are running code I've written. I've been using ZFS in production for as long as one possibly can. My home file server has been SmartOS for many years, before that it was FreeBSD.

> I really hope you at least have enough experience with BSD to realise...

I'm keenly aware of their differences and commonality, having tracked the introduction of a terminal mode bug all they way back to a time when "Melbourne getty" was a thing.

> There's no way on Earth we have less choice now than in the 90s.

Well, I suppose that if you are including abandonware and dead product offerings in the list of competing operating systems...

> We might have the industry largely standardising on...

It seems like you are trying really hard to avoid using the more appropriate word for what has happened: "consolidating".

[hnlmorg]

> You then go on to characterize components grafted in from another OS as "unique". That is a laughably low bar, making every potential permutation of existing operating system components distinct offerings in competition for mindshare.

That's literally no different to how Unix evolved. You talk about diversity in the 90s when most of the platforms were being trolled by SCO for containing the same code base. Don't you see the hypocrisy of your argument there?

> Honest answer: you are running code I've written. I've been using ZFS in production for as long as one possibly can. My home file server has been SmartOS for many years, before that it was FreeBSD.

Then it seems very strange that you don't acknowledge the differences in current platforms while proclaiming that Unix was more diversified in the 90s (if it was that clear cut SCO wouldn't have been trolling everyone).

> Well, I suppose that if you are including abandonware and dead product offerings in the list of competing operating systems...

You're overstating things once again. :)

> It seems like you are trying really hard to avoid using the more appropriate word for what has happened: "consolidating".

No. Consolidating means the removal of options. Those options still exist they're just not as commonly used. Thus term I used of "standardisation" is more apt.

Look, I do understand the rose tinted glasses you're wearing. There are aspects of 90s era systems administration and development that I miss too. But I still feel you're way off the mark with your opinions here. In some places you are exaggerating a nuanced point to such an extent that as much as I'd love to cheer on for the "good old days of computing", your comments simply don't represent my experiences then nor now.

[_joel]

> Being a hobby is a good enough end to itself.

Indeed, there's a word for it which I find particularly lovely, autotelic.

[elihu]

> There's much more competition than there was when Linux was released and that competition is much more mature too.

I think it's the opposite. When Linux was released, basically every major tech company had their own variant of Unix. Now almost everyone has migrated to Linux or Windows.

Competing with modern Linux by creating a drop-in replacement for Linux would be a pretty difficult task given that people have been optimizing Linux for decades now, but on the other hand I think there are ways to improve dramatically on the traditional POSIX-style API that Linux mostly adheres to. For a random example, why can't a given process have more than one "current working directory" at a time? That seems like an arbitrary limitation imposed by an implementation detail in early Unix system, and it causes problems for modularity. There are many other little details like that. I think if Linux is replaced by something eventually, it'll most likely be because the new thing has a cleaner, more powerful, or more generally usable API.

(Kerla is apparently not trying to invent a new API; I'm just saying that's the direction I would recommend to anyone project with a goal of seriously competing with Linux.)

[elihu]

Follow up to add: another way to compete with Linux is on security. The Linux kernel generally has a pretty good security record I think, but there have been plenty of serious bugs over the years. How many exploitable array-out-of-bounds errors or use-after-free errors remain in the Linux kernel? No one knows. If you can rule those out by using a safer language, that might be compelling to a lot of users who care about security above other concerns.

Of course that's hard to pull off in practice. Linux might have classes of errors that wouldn't exist if it were written in Rust, but even if using Rust eliminates three fourths of the code defects, the end result could be less secure if Linux gets ten or a hundred times as much scrutiny from people actively looking through the code for bugs to fix.

[hnlmorg]

If OpenBSD has taught us anything, it's that when you need to start hardening at that level, C stops becoming weakest link and actually the design of the broader UNIX ABIs are the bigger problem. This is why things like selinux and cgroups exist in Linux -- POSIX ABIs are about as secure as Win32 APIs in Windows and thus you need to take additional steps to isolate your running processes if you really care about them behaving.

[hnlmorg]

> I think it's the opposite. When Linux was released, basically every major tech company had their own variant of Unix. Now almost everyone has migrated to Linux or Windows.

There wasn't many UNIXes that targeted x86 aside from 386BSD. And even those that were available were often expensive. Even Minix wasn't free at that time. Which is exactly the reason Linus created his hobby OS.

Now we have a dozen different flavours of BSD, countless Linux distributions and several OpenSolaris spin offs too. Plus many other underdogs used in speciality domains. And that's before even looking at the commercial offerings like QNX, Solaris and macOS.

Just because there are a couple of industry heavyweights that take up the majority of common use cases, don't be fooled into thinking there is a lack of choice nor even that the industry is scared to use anything outside of Linux and Windows.

> Competing with modern Linux by creating a drop-in replacement for Linux would be a pretty difficult task given that people have been optimizing Linux for decades now, but on the other hand I think there are ways to improve dramatically on the traditional POSIX-style API that Linux mostly adheres to. For a random example, why can't a given process have more than one "current working directory" at a time? That seems like an arbitrary limitation imposed by an implementation detail in early Unix system, and it causes problems for modularity. There are many other little details like that. I think if Linux is replaced by something eventually, it'll most likely be because the new thing has a cleaner, more powerful, or more generally usable API.

That's not the goal of this nor any other project that aims for ABI compatibility with Linux and there are plenty of research kernels out there if that's your thing.

> (Kerla is apparently not trying to invent a new API; I'm just saying that's the direction I would recommend to anyone project with a goal of seriously competing with Linux.)

The only way to seriously compete with Linux would be to get large commercial backing. And even then, good luck. Linux won not because it is the best but instead because it's "good enough". Same is true with Windows. Any engineer with aspirations of creating a "better kernel" or "better OS" needs to remember that.