How can we forget BeOS?
I could list dozens of operating systems. What counts as a “user-focused”, general-purpose operating system? Is OpenVMS user focused? Inferno? TempleOS? Open Genera? MorphOS?
I mean, someone somewhere is still using VMS, and Multics, and MS-Dos, and Solaris, and Mac System 7, and so on. But I think @echoreply was just intending to list the ones that are actually commonly used by significant numbers of people today.
Heheh, yeah. That’s what drew me to Linux in the first place. I wanted to write a game, didn’t want to fork over Boreland money, and Linux had gcc all set up and ready to run for free. I just needed to learn that operating system, and I’d be fine*. I’ve never finished that (or any of the other games I endeavored to make), but I learned enough of the system, it’s languages and its debugging tools to make myself a nice living supporting and/or developing for it.
I never will forget it, it was pretty sexy. Back in the dark ages when I worked at a support farm, I had a chance to move to the BeOS contract. I was stoked, I had run it on my PC for fun and liked it a lot, and I’d no longer be supporting Windows all the time. Plus, those (two) guys had actual BeOS machines with Das Blinkenlights!
But, that contract (thankfully?) died before I got a chance to actually move to it, and I was moved to the team supporting the brave new frontier of cable internet, where no one really knew what they were doing. I fit right in, and I was delighted to never have to deal with Windows’ implementation of dial-up-networking again.
*A paraphrase of my favorite quote about Unix(es)/Linux: “Sure, it’s user friendly. Once you understand the first 3000 commands, you’re all set!”
I had a friend who was absolutely convinced OS/2 was going to be the next big thing, and went all in on it, but then it wasn’t, and that was my first introduction on how nobody knows anything.
I wish I also learned the lesson to hedge my bets, but that’s not very practical most of the time.
I used OS/2 at work for while, but I was already too cynical to think it would take off. Most of our SW was DOS back then and it was much better at it than Win3.1. Eventually I switched to Win95 when it was available.
I never got to use it myself, but I remember how awesome it seemed. No one else, except maybe NeXT, was doing that kind of seamless multimedia multitasking. Very few product demos ever matched that allure. Of course, most OSes these days can easily do the things they were showing off, but I still sometimes think about BeOS whenever I notice the Windows UI get bogged down because I’m doing some heavy background task (which really shouldn’t interfere at all… and yet it does).
That’s easy enough to answer; going here Operating System Market Share Worldwide | Statcounter Global Stats
we see something like 40% Android, 29% Windows, 17% iOS, 9% OSX, 1% Chrome OS, and desktop Linux/BSD are probably included among the 1.64% “unknown”. In fact it seems that for all the talk in this thread of Linux it barely qualifies as “user oriented” by this measure, unless you want to count Android.
Those numbers seem sus, to me… I can buy Linux being lost in the noise, now that there are multiple other, better-supported, Unix-like options available. Plus, of course, most Linux boxes probably count as “Windows market share”, since that’s what they were at the time they were sold. But 1/3 as many Mac desktops sold, as Windows desktops, tablets, and phones combined? 1% Chrome, when every schoolchild has one?
For years we were hearing about “the year of the Linux desktop”. Never happened. The desktop wars were part of the problem, but mostly the ship had sailed.
The linked site above is interesting in a few ways.
One - it gathers stats based on web site visits. So it is only counting computers that have a web browser connected to the Internet. Which is what the majority humans consider as computers, but it doesn’t count a massive number of other computers that are not used for web browsing. No servers for instance. Nor embedded control. And the statistics will be skewed especially if the web browsers have access restrictions.
(A lot of places I have worked we had an Internet facing Windows box that got used for email and external Web access, and Linux machines on the inside where we did all our work. This is not exactly uncommon. For personal work I use a Mac.)
The numbers go all over the place if you take by category. Windows is dead in the water for phone and tablet. For tablets, iOS and Android are level, with no competition. For phones Android is about double iOS, and nobody else counts. It is the huge number of regular PCs that keeps Windows in the mix. But they are a moribund commodity.
For example, if your category is “supercomputer users”:
You’re right. That’s another Linux-based, but not Unix-like OS. Just like Android.
Wait, is it 1992? I’m thinking modern OSes that are currently in use by average people. (I know eCommcenter (or whatever it’s called) still exists.) OS/2 was really cool in its day. I used versions 1.1 through 2.x for daily use when I was an undergrad.
To me, and it’s my definition, is a non-embedded OS where the end user is the general public, and is expected to use the device for general purpose computing. Even an iPhone can be loaded with lots of apps to do countless different things. Compare that to a smart thermostat. It could be argued it fails the definition because it’s an embedded OS, but additionally it’s not for general purpose use. I can’t load an audio editing app (or whatever) on my smart thermostat.
And yes, in common use. I’m sure there are people here still using some random old computer to do useful stuff.
Sorry, misread the tense of the question.
Yes, this is really the kind of thing I was thinking of to keep Linux in the mix. There are lots of people in lots of fields who are using Linux based Unix-like systems to do real work. In those cases their Windows or Mac desktop is really only a fancy vt100.
As a percentage of computer users, that might not count for a much, but in certain fields, the market share is nearly 100%.
I think that is actually a very relevant shortcut to get to general purpose, consumer focused operating systems. Do people use it for web browsing? Then just draw a cutoff of 5, 1, 0.5% or whatever.
The graph of Unix versus Linux in supercomputers tells an interesting story.
In the early to mid 90’s supercomputers were still big huge specialty boxes. Cray vector machines still ruled, data parallel was making inroads, otherwise parallel meant machines with only (maybe) dozens of processors.
Then clusters started to appear. That was almost all Linux.
I remember SGI being very proud of how they had contributed symmetric multiprocessing IP into Linux from their Irix - proprietary Unix code base.
SGI didn’t survive. Which is a great pity.
Nowadays supercomputers are insane. Very very big power hungry clusters of immense capability. If a supercomputer has 10,000 nodes, each running Linux, how many do we count?
I never did build that Beowulf cluster. And I’d still like to, with some Raspberry Pis, but you still can’t buy more than one at a time.