Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

I played around with the free distribution of BeOS R3. It was cool, although (like any shift to a new and quite different User Interface) it took a while to get used to how things were done. There was this feeling inside it (or inside me) that an "out with the old, in with the new" approach to Operating Systems was needed in the industry around 1998, as the kludge of Windows 3.1 on DOS 6, and Windows 95, and the growing snarl of problems that was Mac OS System 7, threatened to choke user interfaces in the legacy of their own dim, dark pasts.

One of my lectures in 1994 talked about a plan (by HP, I think) to have processors of 1GHz, with ten cores per processor, with ten processors per machine, by 2010. We can see the tip of it now, with processor speeds peaking at around 2GHz to 4GHz and more work being done on making multi-core chips and multi-processor boards. For Be to say in 1991 that they were making a full multi-processor OS for consumers, complete with multi-processor hardware to run it, was daring and inspirational. To talk about getting rid of the legacy of single processors and dedicated eight-bit hardware and kludgy file system designs could only be a step forward.

Cut to now. Be doesn't exist. A group of committed enthusiasts are working on Haiku, an attempt to build the BeOS that was hinted at in R5, working not from any Be source code but from the release of the BeOS APIs as codified in R5 Personal Edition. Blue Eyed OS and Cosmoe are other projects attempting the same thing but Haiku seems to have the most support. They can do this because BeOS was modular, so as they write each unit they can put it into the rest of the OS and see how it behaves. (Try doing that with a more expensive OS.)

Certainly one of the things that strikes me about the current state of play with commercial and free OSes is that the common thing they have is legacy code and legacy APIs, and in some cases legacy hardware, to support. Apple got caught in that trap back in the 1990s, where System 7 had to support the possibility of running on a Mac Plus and a Mac IIfx, which were quite different processor architectures. Now they only support a small group of relatively similar architectures. Microsoft is caught in a similar trap, with people trying to install Windows XP on Pentium IIs with 64MB of memory. I'd feel sorry for them both if it wasn't for the fact that Linux can run on most of these architectures almost equally well.

As far as I can see, this is because the Open Source community surrounding the GNU-Linux Kernel and the various distributions on top of it are relatively quick to take in new ideas and throw away old systems if the new one is better in some tangible way. Rather than some manager calling a meeting and starting a three month process to evaluate the stakeholders and maintain shareholder value, someone with a better way of doing something comes along and writes the code to do it. If this is seen to be better, it's included. These days they register a domain name and put up a web site and make it easy for other people to contribute - acknowledging that, although they might be expert in the field they're working on, other people are too.

But I still wonder, looking at the other OSes out there, if there are still legacy bits of code in GNU-Linux that are slowing things down. I can't help look at the horrible experience I've had trying to get printing to work on my brand new install of Fedora Core 5, or the hassle I have trying to get Bluetooth to do anything more complex than find out the equivalent of a MAC address on my phone, and wonder what's holding these things up. Programmer time, to be sure. But are there people being told "No, we can't just scrap the old Berkeley LP system, we've got to work on top of it?" or "You have to integrate bluetooth into a system designed for 2400 baud modems"? Is Fedora, or Debian, or Ubuntu, being held back in producing an OS that comprehensively and without question whips Microsoft's and Apple's arses to a bleeding pulp because mailing lists and IRC channels and web forums are clogged with old command-line hackers who refuse to grant anyone the ability to use a mouse or talk to their new mobile phone because "arr, in my day we din't 'ave none of that fancy wireless stuff, we had to toggle the opcodes of the boot loader in by hand, uphill both ways, and we enjoyed it!".

Fah.

Please mail me (or, as my fingers originally typed in a subconscious forecast of doom, 'maul me') with your opinions. I'm interested to know what you think holds GNU-Linux up from real World Domination.