My “I’m a CS” colleagues all tell stories about the OS they created in uni. A couple of them were happy stories.
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-828-operating-system-engineering-fall-2012/
It’s good to know how to do it, but there is not much need to go and do it.
Play a minecraft server running Open Computers and every base will be running a different self-made OS.
They are. But you’ve never heard of most of them, and OSes aren’t popular because of their merits.
They do exist, they just aren’t popular because an OS is basically useless without a preexisting userbase
Redox OS suffers from this, despite promising fewer BSODs.
Since the ones that do exist have been covered, I’ll also ask why we need a new one. Linux is pretty good, and pretty big both by code and by popularity. Unless there’s something Linux can’t do, it makes little sense to start all over again with such a mission-critical system.
Adding to some of the other comments - I think this is a hard area for a new OS to take hold currently. It’s taken almost 35 years for Linux to get to where it is today - which is STILL a niche on the desktop, despite server dominance. (I say this as someone who has been Linux-only since 2023 at home)
With that in mind, if I were contemplating a choice between making a new OS or devoting my efforts to improving one of the others (to be clear I don’t have the skills for this to be an actual choice), I don’t know what might drive me to create a new one.
Drew Devault is building one to test HareLang now. It’s called Ares
Every good Computer Science or Computer Engineering major has written their own operating system.
And every one of them wishes to never need to do it again and gains an understanding of just how magical all that “OS Bloat” is.
Agreed, and since we’re at it, same for compilers honestly.
We had much more variety of OS in the past, but over time people flock to a subset for various reasons and the less successful ones die out.
After a point the waterline of what the bare minimum an OS should do rises with these remaining successful OSes, which raises the bar of entry eventually to the point where a hobbyist developer is very unlikely to be able to create something close to competitive. (Well except in niche areas not served by the big OSes, which is not common given Linux)
The Systems group at ETH Zürich where I studied had their own operating system, called Barrelfish because apparently making an OS is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel to these crazy people (this is meant positively, I hold them in high esteem). Side note they also made their own computer called Enzian. The combination of both is intended to allow them to do research off the beaten path with some different core design choices.
And we built our own student versions of barrelfish-like OSes during a course, if I recall correctly we only used their boot code to get the ARM cores on the Pandaboards up and running, then everything else was individual per group of four. We all had a lot of fun with our very individual memory management bugs, filesystem bugs, shell bugs, capability bugs and so on :-)
PS: There is also Redox OS where some people wrote an OS completely in Rust.
And those OSs you made in class are legitimate OSs. But they would need a lot of work to even have a chance of competing with Linux, Windows, or MacOS. Which is why it’s unlikely we’ll see a new consumer-level OS anytime soon.
Yeah if we narrow the question down to specifically consumer level OSes, then the best chance would be if some really big conglomerate decided they needed their own independent thing. Like Google did with Fuchsia, next time Samsung or the Chinese State perhaps. But even then a scenario like Android or Tizen would be the more likely outcome, a different userland implemented on Linux.
There are plenty of desktop os other than of linux, windows and mac. You can even try them right in your browser here:
- ReactOS, an os specifically made to be compatible with windows apps: https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=reactos
- SerenityOS, an os written with focus on 90s UI: https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=serenity
- KolibriOS, an os written in assembly: https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=kolibrios
- 9Front, a fork of Plan9 os originally made by Bell Labs: https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=9front
- HaikuOS: a fork of BeOS, which was supposed to be the classic mac os successor: https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=haiku
- SolarOS, a real time hobby os: https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=solos
Yeah exactly. Toy OSs have only increased in scope, scale, and number. And the public is still completely unaware, because these toy OSs don’t solve day to day problems the way that Windows, Mac, and Linux did when they first came to market.
That’s a little disingenuous. Linux was a university project. But if a new Linux was made today? Why would you use that with the other mature options available?
Disingenuous how? You don’t think Linux solved a real day to day need of it’s first users?
Sure, from Torvald’s perspective, it was a project specifically to solve a small problem he had. He wanted to develop for a nix platform, but Minix wouldn’t work on his hardware, and the other *Nixs were out of reach.
And this was generally true in the market as well. Linux arrived just in time and was “good enough” to address a real gap, where Minix was limited in scope to basically just education, Hurd was in political development hell, and the other Nixs were targeted at massive servers and mainframes. Linux filled the “*Nix for the rest of us, inexpensively” niche, eventually growing in scope to displace its predecessors, despite their decades of additional professionalism and maturity.
That niche is now filled, the gap no longer exists. A “New Linux” wouldn’t displace Linux, because the original already suits the needs we have well enough. This is precisely why the BSDs and Solaris were “too little, too late”. They were in many ways better than Linux, but the problems they solve compared to Linux are tiny and highly debatable. Linux addressed a huge, day to day need of people who were motivated to help.
I think we’re talking past each other. I suspect Linux wasn’t much better than some of the “toy” OSs produced today, but there was a niche to be filled, which it did. So, if something that was as full-featured as Linux was when it took off was to be made today, it would languish because the niche has been filled. They aren’t ignored because they aren’t as good as Linux was back then, but because they aren’t as good as Linux is today.
these toy OSs don’t solve day to day problems the way that Windows, Mac, and Linux did when they first came to market.
Yes, this is the exact point I made in my first post. And in depth in my response.
Momentum, support and compatibility.
There are also other OS’es like FreeBSD and openBSD that are relatively widely used and a whole host of vendor OSes like IBM’s IAX or Z/OS or the open solaris derivative illumos (all unix based), not to mention the embedded real time OSes that you find in a lot of cameras and such.
The common thing among most still in use is that they are old, well tested, stable, have a lot of software developed for them + they are in most cases compatible with a lot of different hardware, these things need time and money to achieve and people aren’t going to develop software for an OS that isn’t going to be used because it lacks those features.
That’s not to say people aren’t still writing new operating systems, they definitely are, it’s just that they’ll never get as generally used or well known as the mentioned 3.
Cause you’ll also need to create apps that will be compatible.
POSIX!
There are two major operating systems that are newish and ubiquitous: android and iOS. Android uses the Linux kernel but it is very different then a standard desktop installation of any other Linux based os. And both macos and iOS use the xnu kernel, but, again, iOS is very much a different os then macos.
Jonathan Blow said he might try his hand at creating an operating system (maybe after finishing his programming language Jai, and his gargantuan Sokoban game :)) Sadly it’s unrealistic another operating system will be created for the general public without massive funds.
