11 Jun
2009
11 Jun
'09
9:06 a.m.
On Thu, 11 Jun 2009, Liam Proven wrote:
I think one of the most powerful things in Linux's
favour is that it
shares a native hardware platform with the world's most successful (as
in, in the marketplace) OS.
I would agree with this.
Linux runs very well on cheap, commodity kit. Solaris,
from what I
read, still runs best on Sun kit, especially Sun SPARC kit; I just
today tried the latest 2009-06 build of OpenSolaris on my own PC, to
find that it can't drive either of my on-board Ethernet controllers,
so I can't even get online to download drivers.
I was wondering about this, but haven't had time to try OpenSolaris, and the
last version of Solaris I tried on x86 was Solaris 7.
Linux may only have 1% of the desktop PC market, but
that's 1% of an
awful lot. It is now a mass-market OS, with significant support, lots
of drivers and so on. This isn't true of the BSDs, OpenSolaris, Mac OS
X or Darwin, or indeed of *anything* else except Windows. All the
other x86 PC OSs other than Windows and Linux are still specialist,
minority tools...
If Linux only has 1% of the desktop PC market, it is a *LONG* way behind Mac
OS X which has been increasing its market share at a nice pace.
But still, this is why I am always glad to see
relatively obscure
minority OSs making it to the PC. The commercial versions may dead or
as good as, but there's a small chance of survival for AmigaOS (in the
form of AROS) and BeOS (in the form of Haiku) because they're now open
source projects running on commodity x86 hardware.
BeOS ran for a number of years on x86. If Amiga wanted Amiga OS to survive,
they'd port it to x86. Thanks for mentioning Haiku, I couldn't remember
what the name changed to, and haven't had time to google it. What is its
current state? Do you happen to have any idea which is closer to a V1.0
release, AROS or Haiku? It has been way to long since I've had time to
follow such things.
Zane