"Fragmentation"??
We have a huge monoculture of Intel x86/x64 on the desktop, driven by Intel's fab advantage that smothered all alternative (and often superior) architectures. And recently, a second one has sprung up with ARM on mobile.
And it hasn't really been good for the industry.
Fortunately, the Windows monoculture in OSes has been broken, so much that MS wasn't able to extend it to mobile and has been driven to give away their OS updates.
In terms of porting, CPU architecture is far less of a problem than you might think. Tiny NeXT managed to make its OS available for four CPU architectures: 68K, i386, SPARC and HP-PA, with apparently PPC and MC88K available in-house. Write Once, Run Anywhere™, all with native binaries, no intermediate layer needed.
And these were processors with different endian-ness, RISC, CISC, sliding register windows, sparse register sets etc.
Intel's problems over the past year aside, they have done an amazing job pushing the limits of computation over the past decades.
Not that core count is everything but consumer desktop CPUs have stagnated quite a bit. Here's to hoping AMD stirs it up a bit.
Nowadays the CPU is the bottle-neck even when surfing the web and using simple (electron) text editors.
This is a little hyperbolic. There have been occasional superior alternatives but "often" is kinda silly. By and large, the best products won - and that is despite accepting that Intel acted in anti-competitive ways in the past (Cyrix et al).
Agreed, somewhat, but you are conflating "product" and "architecture". I specifically meant architecture.
Intel was usually at least one process generation ahead of competitors, and often more than that. With Moore's law still going at full tilt, that meant not only more transistors, but also faster transistors, completely overwhelming the architectural deficits.
> occasional superior alternatives but "often" is kinda silly
Hmm...just off the top of my head: Motorola 68K, MicroVAX, LSI-11, SPARC, AMD 29K, Power, RISC, MIPS, Transputer, Alpha, HP-PA, ARM for desktop, Motorola 88K, Fairchild Clipper, etc.
I'd be hard-pressed to name an architecture that wasn't superior to i386. But architecture did not matter. With Moore's law no longer also getting us faster transistors, it might matter again: https://rodneybrooks.com/the-end-of-moores-law/
Except wait, maybe this is just my cynicism talking, but I have a feeling intel has the resources to just plough forward with x86 and prevent any competition from gaining a foothold in the markets where they hold dominance (laptop, desktop, server). ARM continues to dominate mobile and perhaps some small portion of servers. POWER and SPARC stay in their little niches. Perhaps RISC-V makes its way into a couple of embedded appliances. And that's it, for the foreseeable future.
So you still have two, at least with Gnome 3 on Wayland.
I am so glad to hear they are fixing this in wayland and there will be only one clipboard by default going forward.
Not so! Imagine that each processor is made by their own company (to simplify it) and has its own ISA. Thus, processor A can emulate processors B and C, B can emulate A and C, and C can emulate A and B.
Also, relative strengths of the OS (if thread creation is relatively slow, it may not be worthwhile to multi-thread a short code fragment; one OS might have three kinds of spin locks, another only two; if there are many registers, you may need larger stacks per thread, and may want to limit the number of threads in memory-constrained devices) are bigger ones.
IME it’s harder to port to a new os than a new ISA.
Computers were sold with hardware and software designed to work together and provide a full stack experience.
Not a puzzle of bits-and-pieces.
The only programming language I actually do have care about the underlying OS is C, due to its dependency on POSIX as an extension of ANSI libc.
Do you have any experience how it was to target the home market before PCs and Windows took over it?