There isn’t really a use-case for a fundamentally new OS. There isn’t a particular need that’s going unmet by the big three, and the existing base of applications and driver support on Linux/mac/windows is vast and extremely mature.
It’s like saying why hasn’t anyone invented a fundamentally new class of road vehicle that isn’t a car, truck, bus or motorbike, using entirely separate roads, infrastructure and fuel? Do we have a sudden shortage of inventors and engineers?
Well, no. No we don’t. I’m sure someone could come up with an absolutely delightful monowheel gyroflivver, and it would be all kinds of creative and neat.
But if it won’t fit in anyone’s garage, can’t share existing roads, needs a while network of clockwork-winding stations and can only carry your stuff in specially-shaped tow-pods you have to buy separately … then nobody’s going to use that to get to work, or go shopping, or wherever the hell do with cars I don’t have one idk - so only three people will ever buy one, and there’ll never be any infrastructure for them.
You better trademark-protect gyroflivver before anyone steal it.
Already stole it from Asimov :D
Too late, I just mailed the patent office and fired up the forge
As a wannabe patent troll, I’m going to say you are to late. I’ll see you in court.
Man, this day just keeps getting better 🥹 I’ve always wanted to fight a patent troll!! Be careful on the tracks, I will be gyrating along on my gyroflivver
While it’s possible that this is the case, we don’t actually know that because the people with the right skills aren’t spending a lot of time and resources on experimenting with new ideas and concepts unless there’s profit to be made from it.
Chances of coming up with an idea for a new kind of OS that will bring great return on investment in terms of profit and market share are very low, so entrepreneurs are spending their time thinking about more lucrative ventures.
If we lived in a post-scarcity Communist society where everyone is free to do what they feel is important and fulfilling to them, we’d be more likely to see new and novel ways of interfacing with computers (and technology in general).
But we don’t.
Edit: Also, operating systems are a lot of work.
Nice answer
People come up with “new” modes of transportation all the time. And all of them are shittier version of busses and trains. There are just a limited number of ways to effectively do a thing, and solutions will naturally move towards the same form.
That goes for transport, crabs, and computer kernels
Crabs?
Thanks.
More specifically: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation
No real need or funding. Designing a new kernal is not an easy task and no matter what youre gonna run into hardware compatibility issues. Why waste time on that when there are plenty of open source gnu/linux based distrobutions that are both free and compatable.
Im sure there are people out there designing a completely new alternative kernal as a hobby but it would inredibly unlikely for it to reach the popularity of gnu/linux, windows, or mac
They likely were making the operating systems while balancing their job to cover expenses like rent and food.
I think for anybody that wants to make a new OS would simply make a Linux distro. Additionally all of these large operating systems have been actively developed by hundreds, if not thousands of people for 30 years. That’s a lot of work for a small team, even if dedicated.
There is a massive amount of operating systems already. List of operating systems.
Why would you like to create a new one? A lot of the existing systems are specialized for use case and or hardware.
If you want something for general PC use then you have the software problem afterwards, a OS is useless without software support. You need a critical mass of supported software before it taken of. Means money and time.
If you want to make it windows compatible you have the copyright problem, if you are flying to close to the sun it will burn you before you get to your destination .
TL:DR to high effort, low outcome.
Because it’s pointless.
- There’s no real need / use case for a new OS. Existing ones cover about everything;
- Operating systems nowadays are way more complex than they were, you can’t just pick and a successful one, you’ve to support very complex protocols, hardware and lots of different architectures - even for Linux it’s hard to keep up with all the ARM CPUs;
- Contrary to popular belief (what the Linux people on Lemmy think) the success of an OS nowadays is tied to ecosystems and applications. Building the OS doesn’t lead to anything if you can’t get companies like Adobe, Microsoft, Autodesk, Google etc. to write the software that people use for it.
That’s got a lot better recently with everyone moving to web anyway though
Proton was the last piece of the puzzle needed for full parity imo
Web is nice and welcomed yes, but it isn’t native performance nor a native Adobe application.
I think Adobe is looking at a web based Photoshop aren’t they?
But yes the Adobe suite is one of the last hurdles for parity, if I could afford it anyway that is
I think Adobe is looking at a web based Photoshop aren’t they?
Browsers have limitations and PS is a complex product. Consider this, Adobe made a native iOS version of Photoshop for the iPad and it has just a few select features that the desktop version offers, the performance isn’t that great as well… So, if Adobe can’t even create a native Photoshop clone for another OS (that centrally shares core code with the desktop version) what makes you think they would be able to deliver anything on a browser that would come even close?
I’m not sure whether that’s a matter of hardware limitations or company resources to port it though
Not to say web would receive more than mobile
On Wayland though… That’s the next bit IMO. Maybe the final one.
I’m running Wayland on my two Nvidia machines and it’s workable, I can get high performance in most games under wayland, though I believe that is through xwayland
Yeah I ran Wayland and Steam was working pretty well with it. But when I bought a HiDPI display (1440p), Steam looked like absolute garbage for some reason. Really blurry text and images, and parts of the UI kept flickering or going blank. I don’t know how to solve that. Especially since the only change was in the resolution of the display. Everything else was identical.
I’m using hidpi and have similar flickering, but it still works and the games look fine so I just ignore it
That’s the thing, the game looks like crap for me, low-res and blurry. It’s Rocket League.
I just saw that you could maybe disable Steam from using Wayland, and fall back to using X11 instead, when using the flatpak version (which I am). So presumably that would make it use XWayland? But I thought Steam was using that anyway. I don’t freaking know.
Maybe what I actually need to find is how to get HiDPI working for XWayland. 🤷♂️
Weird, I’ve just tried booting up rocket league and it looks fine to me. I’m not using the flatpak, using the nix package
I thought steam always used xwayland as well.
Is it only rocket league that has this problem or everything?
Could be your specific GPU unfortunately I’ve had a few Nvidia issues happen on one GPU but not another under an identical stack, they don’t seem to test their Linux drivers properly
Because it’s pointless.
This is like Marvel Movie brain except applied to OSs. This mindset suggests that the only conceivable rationale for an OS is that it’s tied to shiny brand names and commercial rationalizations.
Despite this insistence, numerous alternative OS’s do in fact exist and have been listed here. And the range of motivations extends beyond just having glossy icons for whatever the first 3 or 4 companies that pop in your head.
You have:
- experimentation and novelty/niche interest that don’t align with specific commercial interests (e.g. Menuet OS, TempleOS)
- user-oriented design philosophies with specific definitions of speed and useability (e.g. Haiku OS)
- study/teaching in academic context
- niche/emerging product categories (QNX)
If you are able to understand why people would have these kinds of interests, it’s the kind of thing that lights a fire in your mind, and for some people, sets them on a career, or opens up a major new interest, or leads to them having fun with projects that scratch their own itch, so to speak in ways that do lead to commercial applications (lest we forget that every FAANG has an origin story about how it started with tinkering in a garage). “Because it’s pointless” makes me feel like I’m witnessing that inner fire of curiosity and sense of possibility die in real time.
It doesn’t mean there’s no barrier to market penetration or no difficulty creating a kernel, but there’s so much more to the WHY of creating an OS than getting listed on Nasdaq.
No need for the weird jab at Linux people. .
At this point the sheer complexity is too much of a barrier to entry. You are talking about centuries of man-hours to even approach par.
There are. They just don’t have a lot of popularity. Take a look at RedoxOS for example.
TheseusOS is another interesting one.
Or GNU HURD, FreeBSD, ReactOS, Singularity, TempleOS, …
Because now you can just use Linux or BSD. That wasn’t the case when Linux was developed.
So it only really makes sense for special cases - like Huawei’s new OS for phones (they cannot use Android), or Google’s attempt at a new kernel for Android too (they want to escape the GPL).
They do, take a look sometime on GitHub. There’s just not a lot of traction when the big players can run on so many other platforms. And often faster than the hobbies counter part.
All three big oses are also made by a staggering amount of people that all worked together. And even in the case of BSD/Linux/minux/ect, lot of people worked on it that made money off it. Temple OS is probably the only exception as it is well known and mostly(?) made by one person.
It’s an interesting field that is still being worked on.
Haiku os is another player everyone forgets about
A whole lot of work for not much benefit, between the 4 main ones we have right now you can achieve pretty much anything
If quantum computing is ever in consumer hands might need a new os for that, from what I gather they run on very different principals to traditional computers
I doubt we’ll need a whole different OS for Quantum though. That’s like saying we need a whole separate OS for GPUs. I find it more likely that they’ll be yet another accelerator attached to an orchestrating CPU.
Yep adding market forces makes it pretty much like that staying with those 4 as long as we’re taking user facing general computing.
Add to that embedded systems and application specific, mission critical systems. 20 years ago at least, embedded Windows was powering my labs tools ( I can’t remember if it was an oscilloscope or a spectrum analyzer). And shortly after that I was working on a real time operating system from the Unix family, I think that was QOS or neutrino. It had a hideous ide and compositor, with one single text editor that was not capable of syntax highlighting, and that’s where we typed our C programs. To the best of my knowledge neither Linux nor any similar popular OS can fill today the real time requirements that neutrino did.
Now I’m trying to remember what NASA uses for their expensive missions, though I’m sure most of not all code was done in house.
People are creating new operating systems, but the reason they don’t catch on is hardware and software compatibility. It was hard enough to make an actual performant operating system that could work on a wide variety of hardware back in the 90s. Trying to do it for every possible hardware combination available now is just crazy. It can also be an incredibly difficult task to get even open source software working properly on a new OS. Anything else is just completely out of the question.
Even Google and Microsoft ran into this problem. Microsoft dropped Singularity ages ago, and while Google’s Fuschia made it to literally a couple of devices its future is uncertain since Google laid off a significant part of the team working on it.
It would also be very hard to compete with products that are this mature. Linux, Windows, and macOS have been under development for a long time, with a lot of people. If you create a new OS, people will inevitably compare your new immature product with those mature products. If you had the same resources and time, then maybe your new OS would beat them, but you don’t. So at launch you will have less optimizations, features, security audits, compatibility, etc., and few people would actually consider using your OS.
And the new OS wouldn’t have a lot of software. Microsoft tried to make a mobile W10, but software availability was a serious bottleneck.
Because you don’t want to reinvent wheels unless you have a good reason. What would be a good reason for a new OS family at this point?
You’re talking about a new kernel. Fedora is an OS. So is Ubuntu. As for the answer, it is money and time. If you’re open to paying a recurring donation, I’m pretty sure someone out there is working on a newer standard that is supposedly superior to POSIX and UNIX standard, they need someone to fund their OS research.
There is a project called SerenityOS. They are even developing their own independent browser for it.
