Michael Banck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Note that Desktop Environments such as GNOME are not Linux specific. > GNOME runs (and is well supported by Sun) on Solaris, for example. Of > course, GNU/Hurd might have a better implementation of virtual file > systems as Linux, but nevertheless you need a platform-independant > fallback if you're running on something else than GNU.
FWIW, this I think is one of the chief problems in operating systems design today. Any popular and full-featured interface is going to need to run on vanilla (plain posix, X, etc) and cannot rely on whatever fancy tricks the kernel-level services can provide. And all the various user-land vfs things for desktops demonstrate that it can be done well without any kernel-level fancy tricks. But the result is that no matter how cool the fancy kernel-level tricks may be, they will not have the impact on users that they might have had in 1985, when users used programs that were much closer to the kernel. Truly we do have a problem now that emacs and gnome and kde and web browsers and so forth all have their own *different* ideas about how to do vfs-stuff and how it should look, but that's a problem that can be solved by coordination, and cannot be solved by fancy kernel-level tricks--since all those userland tools will need to work, and work consistently, on platforms that don't have the cool tricks. This means there is less and less to distinguish systems at the kernel level. Thomas _______________________________________________ Bug-hurd mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-hurd
