Is there still room for another OS to hit it big?

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You want a non-bloated OS? The nice thing about most OSs is that they will let you cut past the bloat if you know where to look. Windows still has a DOS prompt, and if you look hard enough you can find a text shell in OSX (hint: look for Bash). If you're really concerned about bloat, though, compare differnet linux distros by how many screenshots they have and how prominent the screenshots are on the webpages. More/bigger screenshots = more bloat.

As for a new OS entering the market, it'll probably fare like most of the other "hey we can write an operating system too" OSs. BeOS is dead, OS/2 is dead, Mac OS* is dead, the Acorn and the Amiga are dead. Windows CE is ported to anything that NT isn't, and the remaining Unixen are ported by avid fans, Google, and Apple. There are still some interesting OSs out there running on supercomputers (z/OS seems to be the last holdout), but even those are being taken over by Unix variants (esp. Linux).

I doubt that a new OS can break through, but that depends on how you define "OS." If you mean "a new linux/BSD/Windows distro" then of course. But if you mean a really new OS, like ReactOS, Haiku, etc, then it's not likely. If it can't have all of the GNU utilities ported to it, the FOSS crowd won't touch it, and without the FOSS crowd, it won't get off the ground. Conversely if it does have the GNU utilities on it, it will end up looking just like a Linux distro eventually, so what's the point?

*OSX is a bunch of Objective C cruft running on BSD, it's certified UNIX (last time I checked) and isn't related to Mac OS up to nine at all. Mac OS was interesting in that it had no command line, but it's dead now, just like windows 9x.

All the dead OSes you list are from the 90s (or 80s). They're about as relevant today as VMS.

I disagree with your statement that you can always cut through bloat. A GUI is not bloat. Bloat is a minute-plus boot time (Windows Vista) and could not be corrected except by going back to XP or forward to 7. Bloat is high memory or disk consumption.

Android is a relatively new OS and it's doing well. iOS is also relatively new and is also doing well. Chrome OS has a fair shot.

ReactOS would have a pretty decent shot if it wasn't crap. Wine is at best half baked as a Windows API layer, and without a fully baked API layer ReactOS is useless. Without WDM driver support ReactOS is useless. Without a window manager at or above the visual quality of Aero, or clear technical superiority to the current release of Windows, ReactOS is unattractive. Fully baked, they would be cool.

There are some major architectural changes that I believe will happen between current monolithic OSes and the next generation, particularly with regard to VMs/sandboxing. If someone gets there first with a new OS that does everything people want it to do, they can succeed.

Consumers, for the most part, have no reason to care what OS they have installed as long as applications run correctly. They'll use whatever the computer ships with. PCs ship with Windows NT or OSX, so those are what people use. Tablets ship with Linux and OSX and Windows CE, so that's what people use on those systems. What would end users want that they can't actually get in existing OSs? I can confidently say that Linux is a much more polite environment to develop software in, I'm not dissing it, but it's probably never going to win in the desktop market, nor will any other OS.

The conventional thinking probably was "quality does not matter" when they let Vista out half baked, and realized that if they make it bad enough, manufacturers will offer other options, though mostly it'll just be other versions of windows.

The advent of mobile phones just makes it worse for new and unconventional OSs, since it's a bigger pain to install a new one. SymbianOS is one recent casualty as Windows CE ate it's Nokia market share.

As for architectural changes, again it comes back to the problem with making a new OS in general-let's say you make an awesome VM/Sandbox tech kernel. Ether you need to write an entire suite of utilities and userland programs for it, or just port existing stuff over. If you port existing stuff, you'll end up with a faster/slightly more secure OS that looks just like a Linux distro, but without the linux brand. If you write your own, you'll have windows but without the Microsoft connections to manufacturers. You might have some hope if you sell the tech to apple or microsoft, but then you'll never win over the FOSS crowd.

Basically, what I'm saying is... the golden age of OS development is over.

I actually disagree that consumers don't care what OS they're running, there are a lot of things geeks think they care about that they don't, but I believe they care a great deal about this. As I previously mentioned, iOS managed to nail the user experience so thoroughly that Apple's proprietary phones are giving Android, which is used by almost every other manufacturer on Earth, a run for its money. Apple's hardware is (mostly) pretty good stuff, but it's the OS that clinches it. Windows Vista was a flop, and by being more efficient and cutting out unnecessary dialog boxes, Windows 7 wasn't. People care. If Windows 7 had been another Vista, I think someone would have set off trying to establish a worthy competitor to eat Microsoft's lunch. I don't think the market is hostile to new and unconventional OSes, I think the market is hostile to sh***y OSes.

Any serious future desktop OS will need to run Windows programs, this has been the barrier to entry thus far. Not as important as it was a decade ago as we have cloud apps, but on the desktop people want Microsoft Office and it has to be given to them.

The benefit of a sandboxed OS is fewer dialog boxes, and the more of that crap you get out of users' way, the more iOS-like and successful you can be. Linux has failed as a desktop OS because it does not get that crap out of peoples' way to an adequate degree.

I think the OS market will be decisively more fragmented in the future. We have Windows, the most used OS on the planet, but in some cases heavily bloated and unreliable (ME, Vista) and costs far too much for most people.
Then we have OS X, a very capable, stable OS (thanks to its UNIX roots), the problem is it only runs on a small bunch of machines coming from the same company. It's IMHO the biggest mistake from Apple not to release this gem to regular PCs (i'm not counting hackintoshes here, people). OS X is more than a worthy competitor to Windows, and no, i'm not an Apple fanboy, at least not regarding hardware.
Android is also really capable, not only on small devices (phones etc), but it shows good potential to be a full blown OS for regular computer use, especially considering devices like the Asus Transformer laptablets. Port that thing to x86 and we're rolling

Linux is probably also a good option, released as a slew of free and paid distributions. Some are simple ones you could basically give to your grandma (Ubuntu) while others offer near unlimited options for tinkering and customization (Arch, Gentoo, LFS). The main problems are, though, that there are no corporations behind it, it's rarely promoted in any way, and it's considered widely an OS with a steep learning curve, made by programmers, for programmers. Since there's no real money behind it, it basically cannot be promoted and advertized as an OS for you, and much less than if it had a corporation behind it.
Linuces are very stable and secure if the right precautions are taken, and in many cases (Ubuntu) those precautions are already taken out of the box, but it's up to the people that like linux to promote it as a good alternative that is free and formidable. The best part is the open source concept; if you find a bug or flaw with the system, you can submit a bug report or fix it yourself if you're a programmer.

The only reason as to why I run Windows, is because of the fact that I like to play games on my computer. OS X does not have much support for games (mainstream stuff mostly), and Linux, even with WINE, can be a b***h sometimes regarding most games, plus there are none of the mainstream gaming services that use Linux like Origin or Steam. Especially Steam pisses me off on this, as Linux and OS X are quite similar in the inner workings of the OS... it's not much porting work to be done, folks, get on with it.

Geeks no longer matter in OS success or failure-otherwise linux would have won long ago.

But in order to win in the Mobile market you'd need to convince Nokia, Moterola, etc to use it, and you'd have to, like on the PC market, compete with existing OSs (in that case Windows CE and Linux).

About a sandboxed os, what is it exactly? It sounds cool.

Android is Linux.



Same here, I actually shelled out for Windows 7 when the beta ended.

You may be right that the OS market will be more fragmented in the future. Don't forget though that Windows XP and 7 exist and together represent the vast majority of installations, and both are reasonably reliable. That Microsoft blows roughly every other Windows release doesn't preclude them from selling the versions they didn't blow.

I disagree with you that OSX is really that capable or stable; yes it is a BSD based UNIXy kernel but there are a lot of things about it that really piss people off and those things have genuinely slowed Apple from selling Macs. I won't go into them. iOS was much better. I don't think people are not buying Mac OS X because it doesn't run on PCs, I think people are not buying Macs because Mac OS X pisses them off. I know people who buy $3,000 MacBook Pros and blow away the hard drive and put Windows 7 on them.

The trouble with Android is that it's Java based, and despite significant advances since the 90s, Java is still slow. Yes it uses the Linux kernel. Shrug. It doesn't run Microsoft Office, so it's not going to take over the desktop. Next.

The idea of Linux as a widely used consumer desktop OS is dead until further notice that someone got Microsoft Office running reliably on it (by actually finishing Wine and installing Wine by default), and all of the obscure hiccups that force people to search Google for an answer have been resolved by the team of hundreds of full time programmers, designers, etc it would take to do that.

By sandboxed, I mean every top level process (and its child processes) runs in its own VM. I believe Android does this.

Desktop computing is a shrinking market and I doubt there will be any huge changes in it as hybrid operating systems such as iOS, Windows 8 and Android take over. I can see new developments in the latter space being feasible as it's still an emerging, relatively new market. But there really is little reason for anyone to put any significant investment today into another desktop OS.

Additionally cloud based computing will continue to become more powerful and reliable as more people have access to always available, high speed internet. This decreases the utility and significance of the traditional operating system and will reduce the typical investment and feeling of being locked in to a particular OS, reducing the ability of single OSes to dominate the market as happened with Microsoft Windows over the traditional desktop era.

You're making a very big deal over a $200 program people don't even like the interface of... These days, students are mostly using Google Docs or Open Office. That will filter out as they enter the workforce, and MS Office will soon go the way of Internet Explorer.

I hope not. I use Windows, Mac OSX, Linux Mandrake/mandriva, Debian/Ubuntu/Studio64, MINT, DSL, and have dabbled with UNIX and even Sinclair Research Systems ffs - and I hate them all.


Windows annoyed me after many many years - so i switched to mac, which is now beginning to annoy me as well. that and the fact that i can't run Logic Pro or Cubase on Ubuntu annoys me also. i was able to run Cubase with WINE with some success - WINE doesn't get on with my LCC or ASIO tho

There are versions of Office that sell for way more than $200 (last I checked) . OpenOffice is completely ridiculous and is only really used by students who can't afford Office (even in a student deal) and either don't know how to or consider it wrong to pirate. Google Docs is cool, but still isn't quite Office, as a student doing word processing I would use Google Docs before I'd use OpenOffice, but there's no way I'd actually use either.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/uloop/goo ... 59186.html

Non students (professionals) are exclusively using Office.

The lack of support for native Windows applications has QUITE stunted the growth of Linux, and IS crucial.

Please don't be an open source evangelist before a realist. I agree that cloud software is trending toward stealing market share from native apps, and in fact in my opinion there won't be a difference between a cloud app and a native app in 10 years, but we're not there yet. I started using Outlook Web Access over a decade ago and am actually disappointed it hasn't come farther than it has.

I am not being evangelistic here. Fact is, every non-geek, Windows-using professional I've spoken to still hates the ribbon interface. When I show them OpenOffice/LibreOffice, their impression is that it reminds them of MS Office 2003, which they liked a lot better. Meanwhile, among students in my classes, Google Docs is far more popular than anything else. And I'm not talking CS students. These are elementary and preschool teachers.

Sooner or later, some of these teachers will become principals, and some of these employees will become bosses. And that will be the end of MS Office dominance in schools and in the workplace. Now, does that mean the average Joe User will start running Linux? Probably not. But I don't think MS Office compatibility is what's holding it back. The bigger issue, IMO, is marketing.

OpenOffice is so ridiculous, it isn't even worth discussing as a serious productivity package. So I don't want to.

My main point was Windows app (and better yet driver) compatibility would have helped launch Linux into the mainstream. I think that's still going to be the clincher in the near to mid future.

bull much of the danish government runs on libreoffice(several european countries have had sucess with this aproach, libreoffice even have a department to service their needs), the spiritual succesor to open office after the fall, same goes for school systems and even the owner of timex uses it in some of his companies,.
most formats are interchangable today and there is little reason to pay the extra for microsoft office unless you have a very specific use for it, that said most companies still do but not every office worker and not for every job, the interface also allows for easy pickup by anyone used to office.