When a platform can’t answer “how should I build a UI?” in under ten seconds, it has failed its developers. Full stop.
That's fine, except no platform answers this.
Obviously Linux doesn't, but the Mac doesn't either. Apple of course has it's recommendation, but most developers do not take Apple's recommended path because of course, it's Apple-only, most developers make cross-platform apps these days.
Even if Microsoft decreed the one-and-one Windows development path, most developers are not taking that path.
It used to be the case that Mac developers used Apple tools, Windows developers used Microsoft tools, but those days are gone. Developers want to use Electron, or Qt, or some other system to support multiple platforms in one codebase.
Microsoft has less to do with this than the article makes out. I'm a desktop developer. I don't care what Microsoft recommends, or what Apple recommends, because neither work in the real world where supporting only their platform just isn't realistic.
Linux can answer the question, but you're considering Linux as a monolithic platform which it isn't. If you ask "how do you build a UI for Gnome / KDE / Android?" then the answers are pretty clear.
I think the mac mostly does this. Developers not caring about the answer is a different thing.
But I gather from your comment that you don't actually care to ask that question, since you have a different need, and already have a solution which works for you. Which I guess is fine if you're happy with the compromise.
But this is about people who actually still care to have "native" applications.
Safari is a monopoly on iOS and iPadOS, that's a problem if you want to make a bleeding-edge PWA app, in that it's probably not going to work very well on iPad and iPhone and there is no web alternative on those platforms.
Firefox is entirely optional, not a monopoly anywhere.
The problem for me isn't making bad web browsers, it's enforcing those bad browsers as the only option on a computer platform.
I haven't used Solaris since the last time I used it for work over 10 years ago. Agree ZFS and Zones are both exceptional, I would still use Solaris now where it made sense.
I don't think anybody suggests Oracle couldn't make faster SPARC processors, it's just that development of SPARC ended almost 10 years ago. At the time SPARC was abandoned, it was very competitive.
In single-threaded performance? That’s not how I remember it: Sun was pushing parallel throughput over everything else, with designs like the T-Series & Rock.
Perhaps not single thread, but Rock was a dead end a while before Oracle pulled the plug, and Sun/Oracle's core market of course was always servers not workstations. We used Niagara machines at my work around the T2 era, a long time ago, but they were very competitive if you could saturate the cores and had the RAM to back it up.
I was really surprised by the s390x performance, but I also don't really understand why there are build time listed by architecture, not the actual processors.
What's fast on Z platforms is typically IO rather than raw CPU - the platform can push a lot of parallell data. This is typically the bottleneck when compiling.
The cores are in my experience moderately fast at most. Note that there are a lot of licencing options and I think some are speed-capped - but I don't think that applies to IFL - a standard CPU licence-restricted to only run linux.
I tried ReactOS a little while ago, in some ways it's closer than it feels to being acceptable as a daily driver, in others it's quite far away.
I like the idea of there being more alternatives Operating Systems that aren't just a Linux distro. Operating Systems like Haiku and ReactOS I think are great for being a direction that isn't Linux. It's not that Linux is bad, but it's a slow moving change-resistant juggernaut that isn't going to be a place where innovation will thrive.
That's why it's a research OS, a lot of people (or at least some) think that the current range of mainstream OS are not very well designed, and we can do better.
I'm not saying Plan 9 is the alternative, but it is kind of amazing how un-networked modern Operating Systems are, and we just rely on disparate apps and protocols to make it feel like the OS is integrated into networks, but they only semi-are.
That's fine, except no platform answers this.
Obviously Linux doesn't, but the Mac doesn't either. Apple of course has it's recommendation, but most developers do not take Apple's recommended path because of course, it's Apple-only, most developers make cross-platform apps these days.
Even if Microsoft decreed the one-and-one Windows development path, most developers are not taking that path.
It used to be the case that Mac developers used Apple tools, Windows developers used Microsoft tools, but those days are gone. Developers want to use Electron, or Qt, or some other system to support multiple platforms in one codebase.
Microsoft has less to do with this than the article makes out. I'm a desktop developer. I don't care what Microsoft recommends, or what Apple recommends, because neither work in the real world where supporting only their platform just isn't realistic.
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