Another month has crumbled to dust under the oppressive boots of time, so it’s time for another month of Redox improvements. This past month, Redox’ build system gained support for Clang, SDL2 saw performance improvements, and WebKitGTK3’s HTML layout rendering was fixed. Users of Intel Tiger Lake processors can now enjoy external display hot-plugging, and overall system performance has been improved in a variety of ways. And as always, there’s the long lists of kernel, relibc, and driver improvements and fixes as well.
Redox keeps making big strides every month, and it’s definitely one of the few alternative operating systems that actually feels like it might, one day, be an actual contender for general purpose use.
Another month where nobody on OSnews comments on RedoxOS. It never fails to surprise me.
RedoxOS does indeed feel like it will emerge as a completely viable daily driver for general purpose use. As it uses uutils and COSMIC, the desktop user facing bits are also maturing very quickly.
But with “enterprise” features like COW filesystems, advanced schedulers, and container friendly design, it also seems like it will become a leading edge offering and not just something “good enough” to use as an alternative.
Relibc is still one of my favourite components. I can see it having a life far beyond RedoxOS itself.
LeFantome,
Everything is a popularity contest, and the problem for projects with potential but no clout is that popularity usually beats merit. Having critical mass along with being “good enough” will win out over new teams that lack influence, even if they bring better solutions to the table. It might even be the case that most people would genuinely be better off switching, but it doesn’t happen because we’re all invested in the incumbents.
I know how much merit Rust has over C/C++, I’ve touted it many times. And I know how mainstream languages keep failing us. The majority of vulnerabilities in software stems from languages with unsafe memory paradigms. It’s never ending. If we care about robust software, we need to embrace safe languages and operating systems like RedoxOS built on top of those foundations. I know all of this genuinely believe it….and yet I’m as guilty as everybody else letting myself be swayed by the popularity contest. I know linux is flawed. Yet I still use linux because everyone else does. I think this critical mass factor is the reason most alternatives don’t get attention.
You’re probably right that we can and should be more supportive of RedoxOS, but I suspect most of us are just sticking with what we already know because it’s the path of least resistance. So with this in mind, I don’t think it will ever be enough for RedoxOS to be good at traditional OS use cases, even if it’s truly the case. It will need to find a killer feature to significantly move the needle, although I can’t think of what that might be.