OSDev.org

In which direction do you think operating system development is heading ? How do you think future operating systems will be design ?

My operating system will emulate all systems, and eventually become the most popular OS in existence. It will be faster than everything else, and will have no viruses, bugs, malware or flaws. AND I will write the entire thing myself. (with help of one person).

Haha. But seriously, It's just my hobby! I'm making it because I like to, no because I want to profit from it. Right now, the direction is going well. Most fully implemented features work well with little or no bugs, and my latest version includes a newer shell (with some bugs) that I am still working on.

-JL

In 50 years, there will be a hardware design revolution. No current OS will work properly on that hardware, and some totally new design will be required to make optimal use of its totally unknowable features. It will be an OS free-for-all.

In the meantime, OS design will continue to be dominated by buggy bloated M$ fatware. All the current experimental design philosophies are all very cute, and will have some marginal appeal, but they will all eventually be rendered useless.

So it is best not to get too attached to some sort of philosophically pure design.

I honestly think that the world economic status will continue to fall thus removing prime disposible income. With the shortage of spendable money, high-preformance/high-graphics computer systems will fall out of favor and become replaced with terminal/CLI-style UI's for efficiency of both system and power. Also, home desktop markets will probably begin failing for the afore-mentioned reasons.

Where are we going ?, at the moment we are heading for melt down, you have bloat that because its so bloated, it has lots of bugs and vunrabilitys, to fix this they add more code, which adds more bugs and vunrabilitys.
What is needed is simple, small, elegant and well thought out code.
We need to do what apple did with the I-pod interface design, make it simple, but fully functional, but we need to do this with the design of the OS.
Anything that works well, has this in its design, eg: the TCP/IP would not of been code today like it was, its too simple and elegant, but it has served us well.

I agree with Dex about the OS design. I am a firm believer in KISS. However, I must disagree with the lot of you in regards to the direction OSs will go in the future. I see the strings that control the system and the pullers are the consumer and the consumer is ignorant! So the OS makers think they must force feed the masses and hold their hands. The result is this wretched and vile OS named Vista with its UAC! Later they will require us to scan our eyes in order to activate the OS and then we will chant into the box to make it do 'our will' which is not our will, it is the will of the designer for we chant their words like zombies! The computer industry are the devils who killed the scientist for his ideas. The coders in 10 years will be lazy from .NET and no one will write in ASM; they'll sear as if it were BASIC! They would have forgotten the OS as they are user-mode programmers, not kernel developers. So who will be left to write the OS? Well Microsoft will buy up everyone, so just M$! Thus, assimilation to the Windows family begins and you will learn to love it or else. lol

The moral: MS rules the world and the OS direction is becoming/will become more and more totalitarian until YOU are the computer! Let's pray.

Somebody, somewhere, in the world will have some source code to an operating system that isn't written by Microsoft. The linux kernel, for example. There will always be competition to Microsoft... maybe not great competition, maybe not noticeable competition, but there will always be somebody else. Even if it just a single person.

As for the command line thing... CLI will never be mainstream again. It's just too much work compared to GUI. It doesn't look pretty, therefore it isn't friendly, therefore it's harder.