Making your os known to a wider audience

[brain]

Hi all

I have been trying to think of ways of getting my os known to a wider audience as I approach something fellow developers might like to play with. obviously there are the usual techniques to getting wider exposure such as seo and word of mouth, but I am wondering what other different strategies people here used to get their os known to a wider audience, for example I know that rdos has parts of his code used in petrol station pumps, and reactos I had heard of even before coming here. myself, I am aiming to fill a specific niche so I hope this will suffice for me. of course it is just as likely I end up creating an os that nobody but me ever uses! thoughts?

[brain]

I've never considered it a mistake to get anything I've written known about and its never failed to work because I write things others want - of course I agree trying to make any money or a business out of it would be doomed to fail. are you telling me you don't bother to promote your os in any way? If so, why bother?

[bluemoon]

Marketing is one of the last item in the agenda.

[naf456]

The Point of building an OS without marketing it?
ugh... Bragging rights to friends who think there "All that" by changing directories in a BASH terminal.
Leverage for a job - Some people can get jobs in like Apple and HP and that, albeit rare.
Also because it fun, and rewarding, to be able to harness Man Greatest tool, and to be able to create cyborg monkeys to take over the universe MWHAHAHAHAHA!

-Oh and to impress girls! (yet my success rates with this is poor :/)

[gravaera]

The Point of building an OS without marketing it?
ugh... Bragging rights to friends who think there "All that" by changing directories in a BASH terminal.
Leverage for a job - Some people can get jobs in like Apple and HP and that, albeit rare.
Also because it fun, and rewarding, to be able to harness Man Greatest tool, and to be able to create cyborg monkeys to take over the universe MWHAHAHAHAHA!

-Oh and to impress girls! (yet my success rates with this is poor :/)

You've got to be using your kernel regularly for that one to work -- the idea is to casually use it, then when they come looking over your shoulder and asking, "What program is that?", you nonchalantly start putting on the moves and stuff, and play it off all cool, then rope them in with the finisher, "Well, yea, I did write it all by myself: I have my repository of code online, copyrighted and stuff. I'm hoping it gets me somewhere big, but you know, these things don't always work out the way you imagine, heh."

Pr0 tips.

Not that I've really tried it myself or anything...trololol?

[brain]

You've got to be using your kernel regularly for that one to work -- the idea is to casually use it, then when they come looking over your shoulder and asking, "What program is that?", you nonchalantly start putting on the moves and stuff, and play it off all cool, then rope them in with the finisher, "Well, yea, I did write it all by myself: I have my repository of code online, copyrighted and stuff. I'm hoping it gets me somewhere big, but you know, these things don't always work out the way you imagine, heh."

Pr0 tips.

Not that I've really tried it myself or anything...trololol?

well I develop a lot of my code on a personal netbook on my lunch at work so I get the "what's that" question a lot, this one would work if the place I worked at was bigger

[Brendan]

Hi,

I've never considered it a mistake to get anything I've written known about and its never failed to work because I write things others want - of course I agree trying to make any money or a business out of it would be doomed to fail. are you telling me you don't bother to promote your os in any way? If so, why bother?

The problem is "when" and "to whom". If you release it to the general public too early, the general public's first impression will be "buggy with no apps and no drivers" and they'll continue having that impression long after it ceases to apply. The normal approach is to start with an "alpha" pre-released and a much smaller audience, and when most of their complaints are resolved move up to a slightly larger audience, then an even larger audience, etc; so that by the time you actually release to the general public you know that almost all of the problems they could've/would've had have been resolved.

With this in mind, I'd probably begin with an announcement here. If that goes well you'll know which areas need more work, and you can fix those problems and do another announcement here. If you ever get to the point where people say it works for them, then you might consider writing some article about it and submitting it to places like OSNews.


Cheers,

Brendan

[AndrewAPrice]

As Brendan was stating, you need to make a good first impression.

I'm silently working on a flexible API and a lot of applications (it makes the OS fun to play with in a VM).

A web server (just static HTML pages), a word processor (just have bold, italic, and headings), a couple of simple games (e.g. Minesweeper/Pong/Maze Game/etc) would not take very long to whip up, and would add a lot of value to the initial perception of the operating system.

Your first release is going to be the first time people boot up your OS in a VM, so you have to put on a show for them, so to speak. Have lots of things to play with and lots of things to tweak.

[gravaera]

Yo:

Nobody really wants to use an Office suite other than MS Office; nobody wants to waste time using a professional photo editor other than Adobe Photoshop. Nobody wants to have to use audio-comm software other than Ventrilo/Teamspeak. Nobody wants to waste time tinkering with patches, libraries and system settings in order to get industry standard software to work on a platform.

Distributing a userspace without support for the applications that people are interested in using will keep you in the background forever. Switching costs include not only monetary or temporal setbacks, but they include the amount of "care" needed on the part of the user to make the solution appealing. If the user has to "care" too much about various aspects that don't really affect the price of gas, then there is an extra switching cost bundled with your software.

You can consider it a form of soft lock-in, where "complacency" and "inertia" will enable a user to begin to appreciate things that are familiar simply because of the familiarity, and even if something new is interesting, useful or an improvement, if it does not also support the current paradigm, it can be pushed aside as "not actually worth the stress".

Having "a word processor" is not the same as "having support for the suite of MS Office applications out of the box", and your word processor will be looked at as an "innovative idea that shows the strengths of <NEW-OS>", and shows that "big names aren't everything!", but overall it'll be seen as a toy and part of your "demonstration". Until they can open Microsoft Word, to most users all they see is "a cool new OS" with "great potential".

When they first open MS Word on the other hand, suddenly it becomes "a really smooth working environment" that "seamlessly integrates with powerful applications from multiple vendors" to manage your files and "crucial data". Is this not how people write? Isn't this how things are critiqued? It's not about having applications for every need. It's about having support for the most used applications in every category.

"Oh, look at this new OS here...it's so cute :3"

--Peace out,
gravaera

[AndrewAPrice]

You make plenty of good points gravaera.

I was under the impression that he just wanted to make it known to a wider audience that they'd tell their friends about or blog about, not something that'll get people to dump their full time Linux/Windows/OS X desktops for.

MenuetOS would be a lot less cooler - if it didn't have a web browser, a media player, a bunch of games built in and was just a simple shell waiting for users to develop for it instead.

Syllable, Haiku,
Dex OS wouldn't be anywhere if the initial release didn't contain some software they could at least play with. I don't assume anyone but maybe 2 people in the world would have a computer running one of those OS's full time, but they do have a dedicated fan base writing software for them.

On the other hand, the several different BSDs are popular because users CAN run their favourite Unix program on them and their favourite desktop environment. But to me, I don't find Yet Another POSIX Clone™ any more interesting than using another Linux distro since once configured, they all effectively act and look the same to me (even if internally they work different) and run all of the same software (KDE, GNOME, Xfce, etc) so I may as well stick with the Linux distro I like best.