Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

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I'd argue that the GNU/Unix text interface is open, interoperable, and highly polished. The key ingredient is time.

Modern windowing systems are also very similar. A Windows 3.1 or early MacOS user would have no trouble using a computer today.

Touch and phone interfaces will get there, too, as both software and culture evolve together.

I can't wait for, and would love to support, the Debian of phone architectures. In past HN threads, it has been suggested to me that the real blocker for a good open phone OS is at the hardware/kernel level. That was the state of the hardware environment in the late nineties and early 2000s.

Give it time, effort, and support, and a great and open OS will emerge.

I can't wait for, and would love to support, the Debian of phone architectures. In past HN threads, it has been suggested to me that the real blocker for a good open phone OS is at the hardware/kernel level. That was the state of the hardware environment in the late nineties and early 2000s.

I would like to be that optimistic, but I am not. The PC has always been a fundamentally open platform and hardware has been supported by many OSes for a long time. When I was young, we would run MS-DOS, DR-DOS, OS/2 and Windows 3.x (which was strictly spoken not an OS). After 1994 I also ran Linux and BSD and I never had any real problems hardware-wise. There was a difficult time around the turn of the century with WinModems and printers that only supported Windows. But that was more of a temporary regression.

I remember working hard for good graphics-card support and perpetually rolling my own kernels to support even year-old motherboards.

The biggest blocker in our experimental labs for open-source software was always hardware drivers. These days, linux is extremely common and generally well-supported.

I agree with you mostly, but I think the OS is there (Linux) we just need more mainstream Open Hardware, and hopefully Librem 5 will be the one to push things forward.

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