| Depend is you're talking about the user level part or kernel level part. Android is a "new" OS on the user level, even if you have a unix kernel. And I'd claim that android's userlevel stuff is too different from unix that you can't claim it's unix derived. I'm pretty sure I'll be doing my development in eclipse on an android based workstation in a not too distant future. For a new type of kernel. there has to be a real upside to switch. For the world to really take the time to make the effort to use something different, i.e. a new kernel based on different principles, you really need to have one of the following to happen: * you need to come up with something that a kernel can do, that is a MUST HAVE and can't be implemented in a unix kernel. (in 40 years this was not happened) * You get better performance. (again hard to see how you're effectivly compete with the sheer amount of engineering effort done in something like linux) * You can get by with a MUCH simpler kernel. (As linux is a modular design which is stripable, it's hard to see how you can compete) * we're going to start building hardware on a different HW architecture that demand a different programming paradigm. The last part is not as far-fetched as you might think. There is a growing gap between how we programmer perceive how machines work (and a unix kernel do provide a user space process with a virtual machine of the type programmer expect) and how HW now actually work. But as a lot of people has tried to come up with something else, and failed, I'm not holding my breath, TL;DR There is no foreseeable benefit to users in a new NON unix kernel. |