Hi, On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 01:08:51AM +0200, Arne Babenhauserheide wrote: > On Wednesday, 27. May 2009 16:45:52 Sergiu Ivanov wrote:
> I hope the niches discussion was useful nontheless. Definitely! It helped me a lot in getting a clearer picture of these things. > The only part I am not perfectly sure about is if it's clear enough > *for whom* it is. > > Does "everyday use" imply use as desktop OS? Or does it just say "this > is not only for some specific projects"? Not sure what you mean by "desktop OS"... The point is that it doesn't need to be the most stable or most secure or most performant system etc.; but it must be Good Enough (TM) on all there points, so that people would actually be willing to use it for their work (or whatever they do with their computers), rather than just toying around with it now and then, while doing their actual work with some "real" OS... Perhaps we should say "production use" instead? Though I fear that some people would construe that as focusing on professional users, which is not the point at all... > What's the difference between "general-purpose" and "everyday use"? AFAIK "general-purpose operating system" is a well-established term in operating system development: it means that it's flexible enough to serve all kinds of use cases (desktop, server, embedded, compute cluster etc.), rather than just specific ones -- unlike embedded systems for example, which are usually quite limited. Personally I'm chiefly interested in the desktop case -- but that's the most demanding one anyways: desktop applications are so diverse, that a system flexible enough to serve them all, can easily serve other purposes as well... And that's really the important point: While there are several multiserver systems available for the embedded market, AFAIK there is not a single general-purpose system using such an architecture ready for production use. In fact, the Hurd comes closer to this goal than any other system I know... -antrik-
