The Unleashed Operating System

Probably someone from the unleashed project can give a better answer, but my understanding is mostly unhappiness about the illumos contribution process.

The illumos RTI (request to integrate) process is designed to ensure a certain quality of contributions. The downside of this is that it sometimes takes a long time to contribute a change.

For illumos there is also pretty high expectation of backwards compatibility. What unleashed now offers is a place to do more radical changes and quickly iterate on new ideas.

While the small illumos community is already pretty fragmented my personal hope is that in the future work done by both projects keeps getting merged from time to time. Maybe this also serves as a wakeup call to the illumos project to make some improvements to the contribution process itself.

neuromantik80863• 8 years ago

Perhaps unleashed could be to illumos what fedora is to rhel/centos?

erikb2• 8 years ago

These are not goals. Every OS in the world has contributions and releases. Linux has the goal to be pragmatic, BSDs have the goal to be technically perfect in a certain area, Windows had the goal to be on every desktop computer in the world and more, and OSX has the goal to be smooth and sharp.

If your highest goal is that someone contributes code to your OS why would anybody use it? Think about htat question and you might find your actual goal. If you can't find a goal, then maybe the existing OSes are sufficient. Choose one, live with it, and develop something else on top that doesn't have a satisfiable alternative yet.

rwmj2• 8 years ago

If you've ever tried to contribute something to the Linux kernel you'd know it's not an easy process. They say that they want to "encourage new contributors to repeatedly contribute". So in this respect it is very different from the Linux kernel.

Now I will admit this is going to be tricky. How do you dissuade junk contributions or misfeatures but at the same time encourage contributions? They may end up with an overall declining quality which kills off other goals such as user adoption.

linuxftw2• 8 years ago

If you've ever tried to contribute something to the Linux kernel you'd know it's not an easy process. They say that they want to "encourage new contributors to repeatedly contribute". So in this respect it is very different from the Linux kernel.

I have contributed a small 1-time change to the Linux kernel. It was relatively easy and straight forward; I sent my first patch to the wrong list, but the maintainers helpfully corrected me.

The difficult part is finding what to contribute, IMO.

erikb2• 8 years ago

Everybody tries this. In the beginning contributions are easy. After almost 30 years of everybody developing on the same code base nothing is easy any more. That is normal and can't be avoided.

I agree though, that it might be good marketing to claim that. Especially younger people haven't seen that 3-5x already so they still think it might be possible. Just like a 4 Hour Workweek, or that you could be Fluent In 3 Months in a new language.

improv32• 8 years ago

How will Unleashed compare to say FreeBSD? Better desktop support?

jpttsn• 8 years ago

Is it just me or is the font aligned to justify and the margins set to zero?

Is this an operating system for people who don’t care to make a good first impression?

dokem• 8 years ago

Maybe it's an OS for people who like systems and not CSS?

udp• 8 years ago

Well, they’ve used CSS to do that. If they’d just left it alone it would have been fine.

egypturnash• 8 years ago

It’s not just you. Damn that does not look good on my iPad.

neuromantik80863• 8 years ago

https://xkcd.com/927/

drngdds• 8 years ago

With no snarkiness intended, why would I want to use this? Is it just for people who want an OS to contribute to for fun? The only features really mentioned are "it's not horrifically legacy" and "it's easy to contribute to".

The Unleashed Operating System

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