"To be honest, looking back on it, Unix today is worse than the systems that Unix itself was created to get away from."

Can anyone here corroborate that there are better alternatives to operating systems than the Unix-likes? Maybe anyone that agrees with Rob Pike's view on this in particular? All I seem to hear is that Unix-y OSs are great, but I don't hear much about any potential alternatives. So I'm curious about them.

wolfgke

What Rob Pike is refering to is of course Plan 9 and its derivatives (say Inferno). Whether you want to consider them Unix-likes or not is your choice (many HNers will say it's more Unix than Unix).

If you look for desktop alternatives to Unix, OSes to look at are BeOS (an open source clone is developed under the name HaikuOS) and the Windows NT kernel (don't hurt me: the Windows NT kernel is IMHO far more elegant than, say Linux or Mach. What is crappy is especially the WinAPI; please look deep below the surface: Here Windows gets nice).

The reason why you won't find many desktop/server alternatives to Unix can be read here: http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf Thus lots of OS reserach is either focused on embedded stuff or virtualization instead of desktop or server.

Accepting this, especially have a look at the L4 kernel family (a family of very small and fast microkernels). If you like highly secure designs, you'll probably like seL4, the first formally verfied kernel. Also QNX is worth a look (QNX is Unix, accepted; nevertheless a very elegant kernel design).

sgrove

They're of course not a desktop option at all, but there's also some very interesting work happening with unikernels, which are really only recently a viable option now that Xen can present a unified hardware layer, instead of the endless treadmill of specific drivers. I've been getting into OpenMirage [1] quite a bit recently, largely due to the energy of the team [2], but also looked a bit at HalVM [3]. I definitely recommend [2] for anyone interested in plausible ideas of what the one of the next generations of VM/apps might look like.

[1] http://www.openmirage.org/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjonFD-2ATo or http://www.se-radio.net/2014/05/episode-204-anil-madhavapedd... (audio only) [3] https://github.com/GaloisInc/HaLVM