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What would your ideal Operating System be like?

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f0dder:
"Remember the old style of Christmas lights where you had a big long string and if one bulb burned out the whole thing burned out and you had to go through each one and find out which single bulb failed? That's Microsoft."-4wd
--- End quote ---
Cute analogy, but I'm afraid it doesn't really fit. Yes, you can use it as a coarse comparison between microkernels and the rest, but it isn't spot-on. If you look a recent operating systems, the lines begin to blur - NT (and linux, for that matter) are pretty monolithic kernels, but you can still have individually failing parts that are able to restart... especialy with Vista, which runs graphics as a "relatively individual part".

Makes one think pretty hard about whether to go for pure computer science ideals, or for stuff that works. Pure microkernels are lovely conceptually, but have too much overhead (imho). Striking a balance between concept and implementation is the thing to do.

The Amiga system rocked - we had multitasking way before Win3.1 and Desqview arrived (well, that's how I remember things, being in europe and pre-teen without a spending budget). Amiga had really cool hardware layout with specialized chips, which meant the relatively underpowered 68k hardwared (along with the special chips) did better than the x86 machines at the time. On the other hand, there was no proper memory isolation etc. in the lower-end 68k chips, so when something went wrong, you got a total guru meditation. Amiga was the system that taught me to <hotkey-save> after entering a sentence.

We need to shun sentimental memories (but still remember the past - good as well as bad), be as objective as we can about current affairs (drop the fanboyism and admit flaws of our favorite OS... there's a lot of them for all of them, and we won't agree on everything :)), et cetera. I feel my ideas are relatively agreeable in general, but I know that not everyone will agree - there are pretty strong opinions in this field. It's probably even worse than politics.

Anyway, I wish that people would start writing portable software (and not that autoconfig junk), and that we'd see things like ZFS and XFS ported to Windows... NTFS is cool but pretty ancient, and I'd love to see some realistic head-to-head benchmarks.

Whereismyangel:
Mind reading !!!  :D

40hz:
The Amiga system rocked - we had multitasking way before Win3.1
-f0dder (August 15, 2008, 01:14 AM)
--- End quote ---

OS-9 had it before that. I remember seeing it run on a Tandy/Radio-Shack CoCo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-9#21st_century_uses

The OS-9 version 2.4 manual had this entry describing UNIX in the Glossary of Appendix C of "Using Professional OS-9":

UNIX:
An operating system similar to OS-9, but with less functionality and
special features designed to soak up excess memory, disk space and CPU
time on large, expensive computers.

--- End quote ---

I just discovered OS-9 is still available (in a vastly updated form) for embedded systems:

http://www.microware.com/products/datasheet_page.cfm?productdatasheetsid=1412

Edvard:
I remember the QNX demo. And a great article here.
BeOS employed some nice buzzwords that should be de facto part of any modern operating system: pervasive multithreading, preemptive multitasking, full memory protection, etc.
But enough nostalgia...

I fully agree with f0dder. I would add that the printing subsystem should be self-contained. One of my personal gripes about Linux is I found out that most printer functions beyond basic text and paper sizes in Linux are dictated either by the application or the widget set.
QT, I'm looking at YOU!I was doing some work in QCad and was trying to print my drawings to American Architectural paper sizes. Guess what? There were none. Someone at the QCad forums suggested that the unsupported page sizes are "exotic" and maybe we should be satisfied with Letter or Tabloid sizes.
Excuse me? Like A0 (841 × 1189mm) isn't 'exotic', but Arch D (610 × 914mm) is?
Whatever...
After some Googling around, I found out that it was actually a component of the QT widget set (qprinter.cpp, specifically) that defined paper sizes.  :huh: I got brave and typed in some American paper sizes and tried to compile it.
No dice.
I'm still waiting for an answer back from Trolltech...

It would be much better to have a completely separate printing subsystem that all applications could communicate with.

I've often wondered what the big deal was between micro and monolithic kernels. Guess I got some reading to do...

urlwolf:
Some of my thoughts, that will sound bad to many people i'm sure.  I note that i am talking about a desktop operating system not an internet server OS.

1) no appearance customization /skinning. enforce a completely standardized user interface.  I think predictability of user interface and good guidelines for coders is important.
2) no different distributions of the OS.  i recognize how cool it is that there are so many linux distributions but i just tend to prefer a more standardized controlled predictable approach to the core OS (im not saying anything about application "packs").
3) no included applications in the OS distribution, other than the most bare minimum (basic text editor maybe, and control panel type utilities).
4) minimal user interface fancy effects -- just a personal choice that i would rather keep the visuals to a minimum.
5) a focus on clean file system -- all of the current major OS make me crazy with how messy and chaotic their file systems are.
6) a focus on providing a clean object oriented API for programs.  The entire focus of the operating system should be in providing a clean efficient interface to coders.
7) a focus on eliminating all hidden system settings.. do not use a registry system.  software should be install-less, and installing a piece of software should be a simple matter of copying files to a fixed location.  uninstallation would be just a matter of deleting the files.

-mouser (August 14, 2008, 01:13 AM)
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hmm, mouser, most of your features remind me of OSX. And that cannot be as I know you don't particularly like OSX. The GUI is standards-heavy; install seems to be drag and drop , etc.

But again, I've never used OSX so I have no idea what I'm talking about.

I can see the point of the standards for GUI/windowing systems.
I wanted to code up something similar to intellicomplete for linux... only to realize that it's impossible; such a huge variety of windowing systems/toolkits (Qt, GTK, etc). Something like ahk (which is a hack, but does wonders) is not possible on linux I'd say.

I once discussed with my partner how a REST-based OS would work. That is, there are basic operations that all devices/files should know how to do -CRUD-. That's maybe a good topic for a post...

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