Quote:
Originally Posted by Rekna
I am sorry but you are wrong. I have 5 years in college, a BS in computer science, and 5 years working on my PHD in computer science, and 15 years of linux experience to back me up. I have written my own OS for a graduate OS class. In all of my OS classes we never once talked about the applications that are provided (browser, music/video applications, file searching, the guit, etc). Instead we always talked about things like memory management (virtual memory), process management and scheduling, file system managment, etc. The kernel is the core of the operating system. It is what sits between the application layer and the hardware layer. Operating system - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The kernel makes up a majority of the OS and thus the reason that Linux is a generic term to describe many operating systems.
The linux kernel alone is not a complete OS. But that is not what i'm claiming. I'm claiming that this OS is going to be built upon the linux kernel which is a majority of the OS and thus is an extension of linux. |
Your list of qualifications is impressive and completely meaningless. Sorry.
I can only conclude that you're either being intentionally disingenuous by suggesting that something built on the Linux kernel by definition cannot be new and different, or that you truly cannot grasp the distinction between a kernel and an operating system.
The kernel is an important part of the OS, true. But that's not the full picture. Windows XP and Windows NT 4.0 are both built on the NT kernel, and are both very different in terms of capabilities and power. Ubuntu and IpCop do very different things, despite being built on the Linux kernel.
Applications are designed to work within the context of an operating system, and an operating system can be tailored to work with specific applications. They're relevant to the discussion because this appears to be exactly what Google Labs intends to do/is doing. So far as I'm aware, there is nothing else on the market right now that is designed that way, and it works quite well with Google's online presence regarding things like Google Apps and GMail (and, incidentally is a factor I suspect in those applications recently leaving beta). It may be Linux in that it's built on the Linux kernel. It would be accurate to call it a Linux distro. But to suggest that it's "just an extension of Linux" and that this disqualifies it as an operating system is nonsensical, and belies a complete misunderstanding of what an operating system is and how it works. I cannot make this more clear than I already have.
This discussion got boring. Circles make me dizzy.