How would you feel about something that prides itself on absolute minimalism, like Swaywm or https://i3wm.org/ i3?

Hi kohlrak,

The OS topic is fascinating by its dimension, technical & money aspects and the forum could easily talk for days about it. For example, is sad to me the UNIX fate thanks to the SCO disputes, the Sun Microsystems acquisition by Oracle (goodbye Solaris) and some other unfortunate events in our lifetimes driven by money thirst.
Yes, somehow "pretty much every OS manage to provide" its primary goal without a doubt. And that is a milestone considering the technical difficulties involved.
My comment about PITA is about being demanding and critical: in my opinion there is still a lot of way to go to reach a mature & strong enough OS. The sign to me is gonna be the OS leaving all the spotlights to the programs and peripherals it handles. But right now a significant amount of time/effort/press goes to the OS: security issues, performance, bugs, HW/SW/OS_backward incompatibility, portability, open/propietary standards, patents, and so on.
A solid OS catching up to the Hardware Tech & rhythm is certainly a daunting task. My bets certainly don't go to MS, Apple, Google...
And my hope (Linux) is severely threatened because is the trendy target of corporatization...
So, maybe that's the reason why MS can easily dump (sorry ,,release,,) a shining incomplete, handicapped, privacy invader, retrograde thing called W11...
We are living tough times and we need to be very critical

We all know Windows 93 is still the best OS even to this day, come on...

Please don't link to sites that auto-play sound without a warning.

Not minimalist enough for me.

Better would be to get rid of the graphical environment entirely, and just do command line. In particular, this allows us to remove the mouse without any issues (other than not being able to use gpm).

Even better would be to dispense with the keyboard and monitor, and just use a serial line. In fact, I find this to be a good way to run VMs if graphics aren't needed (though thos only works if the guest is desi9gned to handle that).

What about Windows 96?

that is garbage , minimalims is the hipster word for missing features
minimalism is bad, what is minimalism if not missing features? the app is not total crap , it is just minimalistic :O

Everyone who frequents these forums knows that the OP is a renowned troll, despite the name change.

Even the mods know it.

They used to take action but now simply ignore the OP in question, which would be my advice to everyone tempted to reply, given the total lack of action by the mods these days. Why people continue to entertain him is beyond me.

In case anyone was wondering, I am posting with the sole intention of announcing that I am downvoting the OP.

Because you're not on Linux.

It's not as hard as it first appears. That's the thing: we lost the goal. OSes suffer from featuritis, they're bleeding security holes because they lost sight of what they're supposed to be and do.

Minimalism is the opposite of featuritis. Imagine for a moment that your health insurance suddenly includes vehicular rental in it's policy and charges more for it, and you don't have an option to opt out of the charges and the new providing of a vehicle.b Woohoo, new feature, right? Oh but that's not it's job? The OS' job has always been mimalistic. We found that when projects focus on only their primary purpose they become better at that, in terms of stability, speed, and security. This is actually one of the design rules for the UNIX OS which is the basis for all major OSes other than Windows. If all it was was simply adding feature, then i would agree, but those features cost things.

I agree to certain degree about featuritis. We would need to separate those between needless and those new -demanded- and justified by the evolution. e.g: Convergence. 30 years ago who the hell envisioned the diversity/scope computer systems would have today? pcs, tablets, phones, embedded systems, industrial & medical equipment, home electronics & appliances (TVs, fridges, vacuum cleaners, toasters), wearables... and it is just the beggining! And all of them connected through the IoT.
But yes, I get your point and I also give it a high priority: Until a serious analysis/actions happen to get on track, the OS industry will take longer to catch up and provide the solid OS I ask for :)

Well, the thing is, convergence isn't the job of the OS. The old model for the OS still reigns true: things that are separate tasks should be separate projects. The OS is supposed to be the solid foundation upon which you build your house, not the house, the frame, the floors, etc. The OS should basically provide the HAL and that's it, and the drivers behind the HAL should e provided by the hardware manufacturers (as they are) via the standard that the OS sets up (even better would be to create a standard like what we used to have with VESA/VBE/VGA). The OS is the frame of the car, upon which the modules of tires, windshield, etc can all be dropped in and changed as needed. In an odd way, you actually would have the convergence you're asking for if the OS' actually stuck to their jobs. The problem is, everyone's expecting that to be way more than it should be which would stifle freedom, and therefore technological evolution. The OS should look to the user as C does to the programmer.

Requiring heavily on the NT kernel, a kernel that originally came from Sun Micro-systems with heavy changes in source code...

But the control panel and location of many things were well thought out i agree. If you look at the versions, you'll see that XP is really a bug fix for Windows 2000 with a new GUI.
Then again, the same argument could be made about Windows 7 being a bug fix for Vista with a new GUI.

In any case, XP doesn't go back to Windows 3.1, it goes back to Windows NT. NT did not have a DOS underbelly the way Windows 9X/ME did.
Windows ME goes back to Windows 95. Windows 95 was a major rewrite of Win3.1 but was still based on 3.1.

Do you vote the microkernel design then?
As far as I remember, they are great in theory (small, more secure, portable)
but my suspicious is why haven’t seen new ones
(My surprising outdated QNX was one of those few, not sure if still)
Might be the low performance compared to the monolithic ones?
Has been long time since I read on that, Win2k was still monolithic
(despite the MS allegations that since NT they used microkernel...)
a quick googling tells me Win8 and the next ones are -Hybrid-
I'd need to refresh & update the concepts to clearly understand what exactly means & entails that...

linux is so unstable , they lack so many features and inconsistent very hard to use systems , maybe they are a little better than xp , but nowhere near as good as win10

somehow he is the troll and not you who dvotes everything and makes comments about such dvoting and labeling others as trolls...
ah the irony is huge with this one

No.

In terms of not crashing, Linux was far superior for many years, and only more recently has Windows been able to catch up. Even then, I still think Linux is more stable in general.

In terms of not changing too much, Linux (particularly distributions like Alma/Rocky Linux and even Debian GNU/Linux) tend not to change much; you get security updates, but won't get any feature updates that could break one's workflow or conflict with the hardware being used. If it works, it remains working. Furthermore, you have the option to not install updates. Contrast this to the forced updates in Windows 10, which can't be disabled and can sometimes break things or remove features that one might depend on.