SkyOS

I'd like to know of any developer opinions about SkyOS too. I don't have any paypal funds to buy it :( but it looks pretty good.

It sure looks good. I'd like to try this out and the new AmigaOS.

Maybe get one of my old boxes up and running with Syllable/AtheOS too.

It looks like it might be a real competitor for windows someday. I'd love to see another OS gain a real market share, and it has a change that apple's stuff doesn't since it will run on the same inexpensive hardware as windows/n?x/etc does.

It'd take a lot to get me, as a competent user, gamer, etc to switch though. Looking at the screenshots, the only IDE screenshots are from an old version and it looks REALLY cluttered and little more than a colorful text editor. They also need some kind of windows emulator (or even a linux emulator - that'd be kinda fun, running a windows app in wine in linux in skyos-linux-emu) or provide really good programs for everything because many I use are the only ones I've found optimized to my tastes (ie Crimson Editor is good and free but not too complex, miranda IM is lightweight but still has exactly that features I need and a nice GUI,etc).

It's an interesting project, but I'd like to see slightly more radical approaches to data management, application development and system architecture.

I wish them well.

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Original post by Oluseyi It's an interesting project, but I'd like to see slightly more radical approaches to data management, application development and system architecture.

Agreed. The world is not exactly clamoring for yet another NeXTSTEP GUI running on yet another VMS/UNIX architecture.

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Original post by Sneftel Quote: Original post by Oluseyi It's an interesting project, but I'd like to see slightly more radical approaches to data management, application development and system architecture. Agreed. The world is not exactly clamoring for yet another NeXTSTEP GUI running on yet another VMS/UNIX architecture.

Take a whack at Syllable.

Well, I don't know, why would someone pay for an OS (that is not Windows) when you can get Linux for free? I mean, Linux has a lot of hardware support, and has a lot of applications, free and commercial. That SkyOS can't really compete with Linux (since it's not Open Source), and they can't compete with Windows either (they don't have the resources and the experience of MS).
But I do wish them luck too.

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It's an interesting project, but I'd like to see slightly more radical approaches to data management, application development and system architecture.

That's exactly what I said when I realised it didn't come with any new applications or changes to the "normal" OS model. I was actually getting kind of excited, too :( I guess I should get back to designing my OS.

EDIT:
by "any new applications" I meant that it basically recycled programs from linux, e.g. firefox, thunderbird, gaim, abiword, etc. It's not like there's anything wrong with those applications, but it doesn't make for the most-integrated bunch of programs you'll ever see. Basically what I'm trying to say is that it looks like an easy to use, stripped down distribution of linux with fewer available programs. If I'm going to switch from something like linux, it'd better be pretty revolutionary in terms of ease of use and having features that actually work for me and not against me (*cough* hierarchial filesystem *cough*).

[Edited by - bytecoder on April 8, 2005 7:06:45 PM]

For those of you saying that we are not doing anything radical, you should take a look at the news post from March 28, 2005. This is just one example of something rather different we are doing.

The meta data portions of SkyOS are going to be very different than what you have seen on Windows, and very powerful. For example, to search your entire hard drive for a listing of only MP3s by a certain artist takes milliseconds. You could then take some of these results, say all of the ones from a certain album, and add a new attribute to them called "Album Title". All of those MP3s would now have a listing in the meta data called "Album Title". If you then search by that album name, only those MP3s would show up; however, they do not simply show up as a number of different files. Instead, they will be represented by one icon, named "Album Title". Opening this will take you into Album Viewer mode, which is a customized version of the Viewer that shows various useful things for music in an album (see the screenshot in the news post).

That is really just the beginning. We are thinking of a number of different uses for this, and will be keeping it as extensible as possible for developers (without making it overly complicated for normal users).

Before you are so quick to judge SkyOS and say that we are not innovating at all, I encourage you to look through the news, look through the forums, and ask questions!

Regards,

Kelly Rush
Business Relations, SkyOS
http://www.skyos.org

That's nice to hear, but Longhorn (or whatever his new name is) will have that too, right? That will be one of it's selling points.
Persoanlly, I wouldn't care about such a feature, but many people do, so I guess it's a good thing.
But I heard from someone that there are a few projects to bring that on Linux as well (I don't know any details, links, etc.).
The problem tho is that you will need to get a lot of developers and publishers (preferably big names, such as Adobe, Alias, EA, etc.) to develop on your platform. Then you will need to convince the hardware manufacturers to either give you their products specifications, and/or make drivers for you. I don't think this is going to be easy, but I wish you luck.

Almost all hardware is supported to some extent at this point. Even graphics cards from ATI and NVIDIA are supported to the extent of 2D hardware acceleration. The only current notable exceptions are printers, USB devices (will be supported in the next major beta), and most NICs (due to the sheer number of these things).

If you have the right hardware, SkyOS is currently usable today; I use it everyday to surf the web, do e-mail, talk to friends, listen to music, watch movies, play the games available, etc. When we make SkyOS 5.0 available to the public, we will also make pre-built systems available for purchase, as well as a list of the hardware that goes into these computers so that retail stores may sell SkyOS certified computers, and even individuals may buy the parts and build their own systems.

If you aren't interested in the feature I listed above, look around, I'm sure you will find something you are interested in. If you still don't, why not join the beta team, use SkyOS, and suggest improvements that you would like to see in a modern OS?

I would join the Beta if it would run on my laptop (using the wireless network card). I currently have Mepis Linux on my laptop, and WinXP on my desktop.
So far, Mepis Linux can see all the devices: multicard reader, wireless networking, videocard (2d only), and my USB devices (digital camera and wireless mouse).
I am more interested in OpenGL support. When it will have it, I will be interested in porting my MMORPG client for SkyOS (right now it works on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and there is an working but in testing version for OSX).
Anyway, it would be nice if you could post a list of really nice features that other OSes don't have. The virtual file system embedded in the kernel seems interesting.

Wow, I didn't expect the creator to be on this forum. Either way, my opinion still holds. BeOS has had file metadata in the sense of keywords for years. A full-blown metadata-driven filesystem, such as the one proposed by Oluseyi, is much more revolutionary. Honestly, there is nothing you could do to switch me, because either I'll stick with linux or, hopefully, I'll be using my BeOS/OS X/BSD/Linux-style OS with a few other features thrown in for good measure.

If I were you, I'd probably work on getting as many devices supported as fast as possible. I plan on trying to reuse kernel modules from linux via an emulation layer of some sort and rewriting each one until the linux kernel modules are unnecessary, especially for things like video card drivers. I would also work on integrating the applications more cleanly by setting up a UI guidline, such as what gnome did. I don't mind paying for an OS, but I won't even consider it until a free trial is out. Anyway, enough of my rambling, I should get going. Good luck on SkyOS, maybe I'll come back in a few years and try it!

EDIT:
btw, kudos on the name. I've yet to find one for my soon-to-be OS--who would've thought thinking up OS names would be hard!

EDIT2:
I just looked at some of the screenshots and found a few UI design no-no's:
* The system manager uses a vintage mac-style left frame to navigate between different pages. History has already shown that this only manages to confuse people who don't realise that you can scroll down to get to other configuration pages. A system manager more like Windows XP (I haven't seen the OS X system manager, so I don't know whether it's good or bad) would be more appropriate if you're trying to target /everyone/.
* You're exposing too many options all at once to the user who could potentially get overwhelmed (e.g. first-time computer users). Generally speaking, you have to study what the most-likely situation is and design around that. If most users only every change the theme, you should make that option the easiest to get to, perhaps by placing the icon that launches the theme manager higher up on the page and making it more noticeable.

Generally speaking, Macintosh usually gets it right UI-wise, except for that system manager incident, that is ;)

[Edited by - bytecoder on April 8, 2005 8:00:10 PM]

I've tried SkyOS thanks to a friend, it's very nice. The networking seems to be slow, but that is due to me running it in vmware.

I had no luck with us installing it on my new computer before I installed windows.

Robert(creator of SkyOS), if you want the system stats, I'll give them to you, just leave the message.

Just out of curiosity, how long have you been working on SkyOS?

Here are a few radical suggestions:

1. Discard hierarchical directories as the fundamental way to store data. Instead, use "virtual heirarchies" or "Collections" to present data items that have important or significant numbers of properties in common, allowing the user to define new categories based on arbitrary properties or manual addition (such as the example you gave of all search results).



2. Investigate faster approaches to application development: heavy componentization, heavy scripting (bytecode compiled or even machine code compiled for release; interpreted during development), declarative aggregation of system components (think XAML).



3. Mandatory system-wide component sharing. For instance, all applications that display images use a generic SkyOS.ImageView component, which then delegates image file format processing to per-format codecs. This means that all clients of SkyOS.ImageView transparently acquire the ability to deal with a new file format if a new codec is installed and registered with the system.



4. Manifest-based application profiles and security descriptors. Behavior analysis anti-virus/security, such as querying the user when an unknown or as-yet unpermitted application attempts to perform certain combinations of actions, such as accessing data and then opening a network socket or attempting to send email.



5. An emphasis on graphical tool alternatives. Editing a config file or manually writing a help file in modified HTML is not as intuitive or as broadly accessible as a GUI or WYSIWYG tool.

Good luck with your project, though.

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Discard hierarchical directories as the fundamental way to store data. Instead, use "virtual heirarchies" or "Collections" to present data items that have important or significant numbers of properties in common, allowing the user to define new categories based on arbitrary properties or manual addition (such as the example you gave of all search results).

That's too radical, and I would not use such a file system. Hierarchical directories are GOOD.

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Original post by Ravuya Quote: Agreed. The world is not exactly clamoring for yet another NeXTSTEP GUI running on yet another VMS/UNIX architecture. Take a whack at Syllable.

From my relatively cursory examination, Syllable looks like yet another NeXTSTEP GUI running on yet another VMS/UNIX architecture ("99% POSIX compliant" - not compatible). What features caused you to suggest it as an alternative?

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Original post by Raduprv That's too radical, and I would not use such a file system.

"Okay."

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That's too radical, and I would not use such a file system. Hierarchical directories are GOOD.

How in the world are hierarchial filesystems "GOOD," as you so aptly put it? Not only do they require file names, they require users to file them into folders if they want to be able to find anything. This is counterproductive in that the user spends more time managing files than actually getting work done. Think about it in terms of google: the file browser consists of a filter box at the top and a place to show files. When opened, it defaults to the user's own documents. Each document is shown as a thumbnail along with that document's unique keywords; for example, a listing of the user's documents may consist of "readme", "config", "readme:bzflag", "config:bzflag", "config:server"(:bzflag not needed, as config:server is already unique). Advanced users, the ones likely to have complex hierarchies, will be able to use the filter box's advanced features, such as "and" "or" quotes, etc., while computer-illiterate users will still be able to function without it.