OT: OS/2, Linux and Windows (was Re: TZ)

[Jonathan B. Bayer]

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On Tue, 21 Mar 2000 20:56:42 +0000 (GMT), Simon Bowring wrote:

>>Well, why bother?  Look at the amount of effort being put into the
>>Linux development.  Include the SAMBA stuff, the kernel, the KDE/Gnome,
>>WINE, etc.  
>
>All these componenets or their equivalents are "done" under OS/2:
>OS/2's kernel, GUI, SMB networking support, SMP and DOS support are 
>far far in advance of linux's (probably 10s of man years worth of 
>develoment better).

Ummm, yes, to a point.  Yes, they are all done under OS/2.  But the
discussion was about rewriting OS/2 as an open source OS.  You say that
SMP and DOS support are far in advance.  Well sort of.  I can't install
my Warp 4 system on an SMP system and have the use of the second
processor, Linux I can, and in the next kernel (due in a couple of
months) it will be a heck of a lot better than it is right now.  DOS
support is still iffy, but there is DOS-Emu, WINE, and other projects
which are working on it.  SMB, well, there is Samba, pretty advanced
and is being held back by the kernel right now.


>There is an equivalent amount of work involved in order to
>>duplicate OS/2.  
>Much more in fact - OS/2 is much bigger than linux!

In many ways, OS/2 is bloated.  Size doesn't mean it's good.


>>And, since this has already been done for Linux, why not just bite the 
>>bullet and move over to Linux?
>
>I am a developer and work on a variety of operating systems, and I
>just prefer OS/2, and have used it as my primary OS since version 1.1,
>consequently I know it well and can get things done under it faster than
>under Unix and expecially windows.  I use unix everyday, but I use
>OS/2 as the client.  It takes a long time to unlearn 10 years worth
>of know how, and learn something different (and often inferior).
>
>Unix is flexible and powerful and allows you to build tools out
>of it's components, but its incredibly user unfriendly and arguably
>highly old fashioned, it is also very, very inconistent in operation,
>and enjoys little or no binary compatibility accross versions and
>distributions.

Old-fashioned, maybe.  But it works, and has worked for nearly 30
years.  It is a mature system, as opposed to all of the PC OS's (Dos,
Windows, OS/2).  Unix has solved problems that the PC os's still dream
of solving.

>Windows is friendly has binary compatibilty (now they've dropped
>PowerPC and Alpha), but is hugely inconsistent, but you can't make 
>it do anything - you have to buy a program that does the job.
>
>OS/2 is nicely placed in in the middle, it's friendly (still has 
>the best GUI I've ever seen, despite it's warts), and allows you
>build tools etc (with rexx and the WPS) without having to buy a 
>program or be a computer expert.
>
>OS/2 is more networking neutral than Unix or windows (which
>prefer their own "native" networking to a greater extent than 
>OS/2)

Define what you mean.  All TCP/IP networking these days is based on the
original Unix networking support.  Since TCP/IP seems to be the
standard, I would think that Unix is more networking neutral than any
other OS.


>OS/2 has rexx as standard (Unix has shell scripts, ha, ha ha, ha!),
>and windows has, er, no real native scripting), so under OS/2 you
>can knock up quick little tools, automate stuff etc *simply* and 
>portably with low resource overhead. Unix is similar but shell script
>is arcane in the extreme.  Under Windows you're got batch files (useless)
>or visual basic (overkill, resource intensive and non-portable)!

Hmmm, don't make fun of shell scripts.  I've seen complete accounting
systems written in shell scripts.  Unix has different shells, so you
can use the one which works best.


>Most Unix programs are simple to port to OS/2 (thanks to emx
>which is not part of OS/2, but has been there since OS/2 1.x days),
>which means the defacto-standard GNU/unix tools and tcp/ip stuff
>are all available easily. I know that these tools are now 
>available for Windows, but it took years, and requires more 
>effort to port to windows.

EMX, isn't that a port of the GNU gcc compiler and libraries, which
originally were developed on Unix?  What that means is that anything
you port to OS/2 using emx will port to Unix just as easily.


>>It is a more reliable OS than OS/2
>OS/2 can be quite unreliable on dodgy/cheap hardware, but it does
>run reliably on good kit.  
>
>>Linux is a full 32 bit OS (soon to be 64 bit), etc.
>And the consequence of this is...?  Don't be fooled into
>thinking a 32 bit program is faster than a 16-bit one.  For
>small prgrams and certain drivers, the reverse is usually true, 
>the "bitness" affects the amount of memory you can address and 
>the "chunk" size you access it in.  

Nope.  I'm a programmer, too.  But 32 bit programs can run faster, and
are easier to program when you don't have to worry about the Large
memory model.


>>And there are a lot of apps available.  In fact, I would think that there 
>>are now more apps for Linux than there are for OS/2.
>Unlikley - most Linux apps can be fairly trivially ported to OS/2,
>many are a simple recompile.  Even Linux's X windows (XFree-86
>which is about the most complex unix code anyone would ever wish 
>to see) ports to OS/2 - no-ones managed it under windows, despite
>having a grillion more windows experienced programmers "out-there")!

Just a correction:  XFree86 is not a "Linux" program.  It runs on
Linux, but it also runs on the various BSD OS's available for the x86
platform.


>Linux has appalling mutithreaded capability (one reason why Java has
>taken so long to port and performs so badly under linux), OS/2 has
>an efficent natively threaded scheduler, so Java runs faster on 
>OS/2 than *any* other intel platform (until it hits the GUI, since 
>graphics performace under OS/2 is usually fairly poor).

Not going to argue, but I will say that the next kernel will have much
improved threading capability.


>Shrink Wrap
>
>Under Linux, you have to compile your software to get it to
>work (different distributions use different libraries and
>executable formats).  Windows and OS/2 support shrink-warp 
>software properly, and OS/2 has had about the best backwards
>compatibility of any OS (apart from on mainframes).  With
>MS you have to buy new or updgraded apps at the whim of MS, 
>under Unix you have to recompile, but OS/2 runs 10 year old 
>DOS and OS/2 1.x binarioes fine (usually!).

Please emphasize the "usually" part.  Yes, OS/2 can run 10 year old
apps.  But most people aren't interested in 10 year old apps, they are
interested in newer apps.

Shrink Wrap, well there are a growing number of shrink-wrap programs
out there for Linux.  There is an almost nonexistent number of current
shrink wrap programs for OS/2.


>If you use the OS/2 server version, there a whole load of additional 
>ways it beats Linux and NT (e.g. higher performance, client agnostic,
>better disk and network subsystems).

Never ran it, can't comment.


>But I can't be bothered with anymore, suffice to say there are
>good reasons for sticking with OS/2, *IF* you're an OS/2 user,
>there are not so many reason for moving to OS/2 though!

I've been an OS/2 developer, user, and supporter.  But I am also a
realist.  When I want to run newer software, OS/2 can't do it.




JBB
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