Good topic, Dex. And a very pertinent point. I myself wonder sometimes if I can ever catch up to the big fish. It's getting way more obscure with every passing month. I just, (yesterday) install Karmic Koala, and I'm stunned by how amazingly fast, and ...user friendly, and 'pretty' it is.
Every other OS in the major league is really moving up, and leaving the hobby age way behind. In order to hope to compete, there is, apparently only one hope: UDI. I've seen several other members stressing it, and there's a family member of mine who has ported it, and I myself have read the specification.
Modern hardware is advancing *too* rapidly. Very soon, everyone will have multiple, SVGA/XVGA resolution monitors, or touch screen monitors of some sort, and any OS even hoping to get a second glance will have to support hardcore multimedia on all kinds of radical display set ups. It's disconcerting.
I think, and would like to point out that it is both foolish, and also no longer a luxury for any hobbyist OS developer to be thinking in the 'I-move-alone' mode. Kernels coming out today have an enormous load of drivers to support off the bat. It's striking me more and more that the competition (where hobbyists are concerned) should not be at the driver level. Because if everyone independently develops his/her own drivers, we'll all fall in the end.
In fact, for any sort of strong OSDev community to be able to continue into the future, we will have to work hard at supporting having an abundance of highly portable drivers for immediate use.
If not, the big league OSs will simply dominate forever. And then, as time passes, more and more, it will really become nothing more than a dream for anyone to think they can break into the x86 kernel development market.
What are Hobbyist OSs better at? As a general question, we offer a fresh outtake on what's already there. Inevitably, we will all have to support the same hardware, and the same tasks. Technically, we don't do much different.
The thing that we have going for us isn't really what we are better at, as far as I can perceive the situation; Our main advantage comes from our pure hindsight where current OSs are concerned. We can see the falter points in Linux (/dev/this, etc), and Windows (evolutionary development on a badly programmed core), SkyOS (closed source, proprietary in an age where hardware is impossible to support without community help) and every other OS out there. And we can pick up the slack where they left off.
What are we better at? I don't think there's anything much for us to boast about, since most of us, myself included have not much of anything impressive to show. And again, technically, a fully mature kernel will eventually have to do the same things as every other kernel out there. Differing only in methodology.
Why should we fight over something as simple as drivers?
This post is very sentimental, and whatnot, but a highly practical limitation is the lack of a champion operating system for the OSDev community. If there is no operating system mature enough to use UDI, then there is no operating system mature enough on which to test drivers written for a UDI environment, and as such, there will continue to be no UDI drivers.
To that end, I'd like to ask everyone to probably, should pcmattman, eddyb and JamesM, etc decide to allow it (they technically have invited everyone to join the #pedigree channel and come do testing), make an active effort to support the Pedigree OS project, which is, to my knowledge, one of the only viable projects on our board.
I believe Mojo is also very mature, what with it having a full GUI, etc. It's time we kind of made ourselves a force to be reckoned with. When the FOSS/GNU horde wanted recognition, they took a project and championed it, and religiously promoted it with everything they had. They went the full mile.
Until we have something to represent what we are, and show that we're efficient, we'll forever remain just lingering around the board, discussing the dreams, and never getting to see them get big.
I don't know if anyone else is feeling a sense of futility, but I definitely believe that if, within the next [b]2[/i] years, I don't get a solid kernel out, I'll never have the chance. I assume that at the rapid pace of hardware development we see today, within 2-5 years hobbyist OSDev for x86 will REALLY be nothing more than a waste of time.
--RFC gravaera
_________________ 17:56 < sortie> Paging is called paging because you need to draw it on pages in your notebook to succeed at it.
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