Haiku Had A Very Busy March Improving Hardware Support & More

[Waethorn]

Fuchsia is not going to replace Linux, actually is going to replace BSD because they share similar licenses

Fuchsia was meant to replace Android. Still hasn't. It's just a skunkworks project.

[aht0]

All of the Steam Decks sold. More to come. Linux has the highest number of playable games next to Windows. Linux started conquering the desktop much later than macOS and it's not too far behind. Linux recently started fixing its the biggest downside on desktop: X. Windows is on Solaris path to the end while Linux future is very bright. The only one who's hopless here is 'I have no clue - ayumu'. The fight just started and Linux is on much better position than anything. Haiku is maybe twenty years behind..

Linux Desktop is like "Communism in Soviet Union". Preached to arrive soon but never arrives. "Haphazard re-invention of the wheel" fucks it up. People want stable desktop, not something where you have to account for x times n issues - which mostly works but once you have figured it out - might radically change some aspect of design in next version. Worse than Windows that way.

[Waethorn]

Linux Desktop is like "Communism in Soviet Union". Preached to arrive soon but never arrives. "Haphazard re-invention of the wheel" fucks it up. People want stable desktop, not something where you have to account for x times n issues - which mostly works but once you have figured it out - might radically change some aspect of design in next version. Worse than Windows that way.

Every operating system is like that, including Windows. They've changed their Photos app, video editing app, video/audio playback apps (going back to "Windows Media Player" again), the Start menu/screen, etc., in every major version of Windows for as long as I can remember. They've also changed the availability of Visio and Project, making them mostly just web apps now, plus cancelled a whole bunch of projects and products. So has Google for that matter. Chrome OS keeps changing, and users aren't told about new upcoming changes in advance. They just get them automatically every 4-6 weeks.

Apple seems to put less emphasis on changing features majorly in new OS versions, but they do cancel products and sometimes features. The most recent that comes to mind would be the iPod touch and macOS Server. Shame about both - the iPod touch was a great cheap option for kids whom you might not want to have a phone, but I can see the allure of giving everyone in the family a phone (great for Apple's business and sales numbers), and macOS Server was a great product in its heyday when they had the simple email server and web server setup options in it. The last few versions relegated it to merely an MDM platform for Apple devices, but they've moved that to a cloud service instead. Stands to reason that they put more into cloud/iCloud integration because it's more profitable to get recurring revenue streams, but this eliminates all on-site IT service management options from Apple as a first-party vendor. Similarly, Microsoft killed off their Small Business and Essentials server product lines in favour of much more expensive cloud options (Microsoft 365 and Azure).

This is the state of IT today. Few options available from first-party vendors without getting it hosted. Thankfully, NAS companies have beefed up their game and have a wide array of IT infrastructure services available as easy-to-install on-site packages for their hardware. And you get what you pay for, as far as simplicity goes. Much of it is open-source, but the UX of open-source options available for free don't have the simplicity of a graphical mouse-driven console view of a service that you'd find in a commercial product. For instance, I can install and configure a recursive, caching DNS server on a Synology NAS with about 5 clicks of the mouse. In a typical free Linux environment, I'd have to know all of the commands necessary to do that, plus configure it manually via configuration file. You can't tell me that a command line interface is easier. NAS vendors have essentially taken over where on-site server products like Apple's and Microsoft's used to accomodate. And it's built from open-source, but with a commercialized management UX. Apple's macOS Server used to be exactly like this. But who's seen iCloud source code lately?

[ayumu]

Fuchsia was meant to replace Android. Still hasn't. It's just a skunkworks project.

They had ported the android runtime like a couple years ago already.

My take is that they've been ready for a while already, and it'll happen overnight, once the decision is made.

But I suspect that, no matter how long they wait, there will still be some friction when put to real world use.

[Waethorn]

They had ported the android runtime like a couple years ago already.

My take is that they've been ready for a while already, and it'll happen overnight, once the decision is made.

But I suspect that, no matter how long they wait, there will still be some friction when put to real world use.

It'll replace Android when Samsung replaces Android with Tizen.

[ayumu]

It'll replace Android when Samsung replaces Android with Tizen.

Google can pull the plug at any time. They can also release an Android 15 or whatever that's actually fuchsia. The user would be nonethewiser.

[aht0]

Every operating system is like that, including Windows. They've changed their Photos app, video editing app, video/audio playback apps (going back to "Windows Media Player" again), the Start menu/screen, etc., in every major version of Windows for as long as I can remember. They've also changed the availability of Visio and Project, making them mostly just web apps now, plus cancelled a whole bunch of projects and products. So has Google for that matter. Chrome OS keeps changing, and users aren't told about new upcoming changes in advance. They just get them automatically every 4-6 weeks.

Apple seems to put less emphasis on changing features majorly in new OS versions, but they do cancel products and sometimes features. The most recent that comes to mind would be the iPod touch and macOS Server. Shame about both - the iPod touch was a great cheap option for kids whom you might not want to have a phone, but I can see the allure of giving everyone in the family a phone (great for Apple's business and sales numbers), and macOS Server was a great product in its heyday when they had the simple email server and web server setup options in it. The last few versions relegated it to merely an MDM platform for Apple devices, but they've moved that to a cloud service instead. Stands to reason that they put more into cloud/iCloud integration because it's more profitable to get recurring revenue streams, but this eliminates all on-site IT service management options from Apple as a first-party vendor. Similarly, Microsoft killed off their Small Business and Essentials server product lines in favour of much more expensive cloud options (Microsoft 365 and Azure).

This is the state of IT today. Few options available from first-party vendors without getting it hosted. Thankfully, NAS companies have beefed up their game and have a wide array of IT infrastructure services available as easy-to-install on-site packages for their hardware. And you get what you pay for, as far as simplicity goes. Much of it is open-source, but the UX of open-source options available for free don't have the simplicity of a graphical mouse-driven console view of a service that you'd find in a commercial product. For instance, I can install and configure a recursive, caching DNS server on a Synology NAS with about 5 clicks of the mouse. In a typical free Linux environment, I'd have to know all of the commands necessary to do that, plus configure it manually via configuration file. You can't tell me that a command line interface is easier. NAS vendors have essentially taken over where on-site server products like Apple's and Microsoft's used to accomodate. And it's built from open-source, but with a commercialized management UX. Apple's macOS Server used to be exactly like this. But who's seen iCloud source code lately?

Windows between 95 and 7 kept to more or less same UI logic. MS might have updated icons, fonts and general design (reshuffled some menus here and there) but they did not play with UI usage-logic in any major way. I've used them all, excepting NT3.x (had NT4 tho). None of the Windows'es between 95 and 7 created problem "how do I that now?", like Windows 8 did. When I first tried Windows 8 - I was unable to figure out how to use Metro and get to Desktop for 5 fricking minutes. After that everything felt like brushing teeth through asshole.

[Waethorn]

Windows between 95 and 7 kept to more or less same UI logic. MS might have updated icons, fonts and general design (reshuffled some menus here and there) but they did not play with UI usage-logic in any major way. I've used them all, excepting NT3.x (had NT4 tho). None of the Windows'es between 95 and 7 created problem "how do I that now?", like Windows 8 did. When I first tried Windows 8 - I was unable to figure out how to use Metro and get to Desktop for 5 fricking minutes. After that everything felt like brushing teeth through asshole.

Your definition of UI is different from mine. NT4 might've looked like 95 on the surface but didn't act that way when users actually wanted to run a lot of their programs. Windows Me lacked the ability to go to a command prompt at boot meaning that you had to run everything AFTER booting the Windows GUI. 2000 had a number of big changes when it came to software and hardware support, and XP was a big change over from the 9x series for both consumers, as well as businesses that had to deal with the garish Super Mario-like graphics scheme, not to mention that user file folders were in completely different locations on the drive. XP SP2's security system caused problems with software that wasn't designed to trigger firewall prompts. Vista introduced UAC to the Windows world, along with incompatibility with a lot of security software, and changed the Documents and Settings folder into a Users folder. Control Panel was completely different. Also, 64-bit versions had a host of issues with compatibility (or lack thereof) with various applications, especially those 32-bit applications that were hard-coded to go into Program Files, which is the native folder for each version of Windows (the 32-bit folder on x64 versions is called Program Files(x86)). Windows 7 tuned down the UAC prompts to not prompt for privilege escalation for user-initiated actions - unlike how every other operating system does - thereby making Windows less secure. All of these are user-facing issues that made each operating system different in the way that the user had to interact with it.

[aht0]

"under the hood" it was, yeah, different. 95/98/ME ran for one, in DOS.

From USERS (not admins or technician's) point of view, they were similar. UI usage logic for users remained remarkably uniform.

[Waethorn]

"under the hood" it was, yeah, different. 95/98/ME ran for one, in DOS.

From USERS (not admins or technician's) point of view, they were similar. UI usage logic for users remained remarkably uniform.

They DID NOT run "in DOS", "on DOS", "depend on DOS" or anything of the like. This is a complete misconception of the OS and CPU architecture. It is a command prompt environment with similar commands - nothing more. It would be more analogous to compare it to Plan 9 vs Linux. Completely different operating systems, where Plan 9 has a GUI baked in that is optional to use, and any shell on top of Linux can be completely stripped out. Plan 9 originally ran on hardware that isn't compatible with x86.