[jacquesm]

>First of all, nobody seems to appreciate how goddamn hard it is to make an operating system. You don't just wake up one day and fall out of bed and make one.

And even that is total nonsense, I wrote my own os about 15 years ago, it took about a year to get it to work. It is definitely possible to write an operating system, if an individual can do it a company with the resources of google could certainly do it (but they chose to leverage the linux kernel, and that's a good decision, even if personally I'd have liked to see google throw they weight behind some foss micro kernel).

[noamsml]

I think he means "good OS that works on lots of machines well".

[tjogin]

Having an OS work on lots of machines is not really a requirement of a good OS.

While they needn't go the Apple route with all-proprietary machines, they neither need to go the Microsoft route and have it run on everything.

Maybe a middle of the road approach is best for this niche of the market.

[noamsml]

If it's sold in boxes, it should work well on many machines, otherwise it's going to get bad publicity, but you're right that if it's bundled with machines, it only needs to worry about some hardware (though it still needs to worry about all peripherals).

[tjogin]

It's not going to get bad publicity if it works well on the hardware it's supposed to work well on. The OS is meant for netbooks remember?