There a only a handful of viable operating systems out there (Linux, Windows, and (?). What makes it so difficult to make a fresh operating system?
In: Technology
It’s not. Writing your own basic OS is a fairly common computer science/engineering undergraduate assignment. But that’s a purely academic OS that doesn’t really do anything interesting and has zero applications.
Writing a full-featured modern OS is the evolutionary tasks of hundreds of engineers working for years (potentially much more). It’s not trivial so you need to have a really good reason to do it. The major consumer OS’s (Apple, Linux, Windows) do almost everything that anybody wants for most applications. Specialized industrial OSs are absolutely a thing but you rarely see them outside their niche.
It’s like asking “Why is it so difficult to make a new optical disk format?” It’s not, but there’s a giant install base of Bluray players and they do almost everything anybody needs so you need a really compelling reason to get all those people to switch. It’s a lot easier, most of the time, to just figure out how to do whatever you want to do on an OS that already exists.
OS’s also have many of the same core functions…once you figure out how to do that really well, where’s the benefit in writing new code to do the same function over again?
Latest Answers