Operating Systems connoisseurs should Be Happy.
Three new OSes were released in the last week; a new Linux kernel, Microsoft’s Longhorn and Apple’s Panther (OS X.3) were released. Apple’s Panther is a full-blown 64-bit commercial package while the other two are available only in a pre-release form.
Linus Torvald’s new Linux kernel, available online at www.kernel.org, is the test9 version of the Linux 2.6 kernel. It’s designed for use on the corporate enterprise level. Desktop improvements include better firewire and USB performance as well as better mouse, video and sound. OSDL will publish testing results online.
Microsoft launched a developer version of Longhorn this week. Longhorn, expected to be released in 2006, is built around three advances–a new graphics and presentation engine known as Avalon, a new communications architecture known as Indigo, and a new file system known as WinFS that borrows from Microsoft’s relational database technology.
Last week, Apple launched Panther , the latest version of the Mac OS X operating system — a descendant of the mouse-based graphical interface that Apple brought to market in 1984, a year before the release of Windows 1.0. Panther, the fourth major release in just three years, offers improved ease of use and reliability You can easily add a Mac to a home network with Windows-based PCs or connect to your office network over Virtual Private Network (VPN) using Panther’s built-in client.
A Seattle P-I story compared Longhorn to Mac’s OS X.
Open-source advocates are (predictably) underwhelmed by Longhorn:
“Even Microsoft, with all its grand power, cannot match the investment of a worldwide group of developers operating in their own self-interest, which is basically what’s happening in the open-source world,” said Russell Pavlicek, a Linux expert and columnist who has been following Longhorn’s progress just enough, as he puts it, to get “the general odor.”
“Across the world you have talented people who are working to solve real problems, the problems that they themselves have,” Pavlicek said. “Because they are crosschecking each other’s code with peer review, etc., there is an effort afoot that, frankly, Longhorn isn’t going to match.”
…”I am running Panther as we speak, it is light years better (than) Jaguar and I shudder to think what Apple will develop in the next year or two, remember Panther is optimized for dual processors and 64 bit addressing.”
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