Hey Doug, thanks for that addition. Wouldn't you say that no-viruses is because it's such a foreign OS? Not language wise, but in terms of use? It's very sparingly used by anyone, and the market share is so low that no one writes viruses for it? Same goes for linux and Mac OS? Mac OS and iOS is becoming used more, but not at the extent Windows is, to my knowledge.
Not Doug but...
While OS/2 resistants to viruses is partially due to it not being very common it does have very high payback. Rooting a bank is much more profitably then rooting Joe User. The advantage is the IBM culture. While MS seems to have a culture of "it compiles, lets ship" IBM had a culture of "there is still some compiler warnings, we better fix them before shipping". This leads to less holes for virus writers to take advantage of.
When you said "If you wanna play games use Windows, if you want to do work use eComStation", I was heavily reminded of the Mac VS PC commercials. Any OS can be used for gaming, provided someone writes software for it, or so I thought? The OS isn't the limitation, it's the developers for the system that create limitations, correct? If someone made a Win32 directx library that ran virtually or parallel in OS/2, couldn't it play games too? Also, if eComStation or OS/2 has support for GCC, couldn't it also install linux software(games), with some sort of driver manipulation for OpenGL?
Of course OS/2 is just as capable of running games as Win32. At that Odin (think Wine) was originally written to run Quake III. And funny enough, directx was a direct ripoff of OS/2 DIVE. The problem now is hardware support for OpenGL, software emulation is just too slow for most games. Perhaps by leveraging LLVM but no-one has the interest in doing the work.
Note that most of Windows is a direct ripoff of OS/2. Even the naming. Internet Explorer is based on Web Explorer which shipped with WARP 3 in '94, mostly as a system DLL so any program could link against it to get HTML functionality.
Back to Martin. Yeah, for a lot of people stability is very important. But how much tuning is actually required, what's the learning curve on doing such tweaks? Would someone have to go out of their way and read an OS/2 for dummies book?
There's a learning curve though much is simple drag'n'drop. The problem now is that people are used to the Windows way (or Linux or MAC) and OS/2 is different. Thing is once learned it is learned. I'm writing this on an install done in '97. Through multiple hardware upgrades this install has kept working. I used to migrate to Linux regularly but it just became so frustrating as every time I learned the system, it would change. It started as fun but with time it was like "how to fix the sound again"
That "microkernel" part I agree seems like a nifty thing to have. I guess that means anyone can write software-based drivers and not have to hook into the kernel or different security rings? I'm not 100% knowledged on "rings" or anything like that, but it seems like that's what it would be optimized for. But they should support enough out of the box to actually do work, and do they? I mean, I see that they finally have support for Athlon 64, which is a decently old CPU. I'm running a modest Phenom II x6 1045t, with 10GB ram. Would eComStation actually work out of the box for my system?
Martin exaggerates a bit. The OS/2 kernel is closer to a microkernel then lets say Linux but is really more of a hybrid. For a true microkernel you'd have to go to the PPC port of OS/2. A true microkernel (Mach based) and the system that IBM should have open sourced, ideally as LGPL. OS/2 device drivers are somewhat a bitch as they still have to interface with the kernel on the 16 bit level.
As for support for an Athlon 64, that was old (non-smp). The odds are that OS/2 would boot up on your Phenom II system and given the right network and video chips would work fine though only using 4 GB of your memory.
My take, OS/2 has one of the best graphical shells ever written (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_Shell), even more amazing as it was optimized for 4 MB of memory (really needed at least 8MB), had a very good scheduler especially for a desktop system. Giving the foreground app a priority boost as well as an IO boost which made it a nice to use (and it could be optimized as a server). It had very good DOS support, even running DOS drivers and also very good Win 3.1 support where you could run multiple win3.1 programs in separate sessions so that if one crashed the rest continued on. The advertised better DOS then DOS, better WINDOWS then WINDOWS was true, even if only because you could use a superior file system. The scheduler was much better then Windows, I remember magazine comparisons where basically they'd test an OS/2 version against NT. After failing to get SMP working on OS/2 they'd declare NT the winner even though OS/2 was faster on one core then NT on two. NT won because it ran slower with 2 cores but used both <GR>
At this point most OS/2 users are using it from momentum as most other systems have caught up over the last decade though the interfaces seem to be taking a step back (look at Win8)
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