After interviewing Axel Dorfler yesterday, in this second installment of Five Questions, we interview Robert Szeleney, the main driving force behind SkyOS. SkyOS has been in development since the late ’90s, but for the past few years, it has seen rapid development. Read on for Robert’s answers to the Five Questions.1. What are SkyOS’ strong points?
Robert: This is always a tricky question to answer in any single way, because really, when answering this for any operating system, the response will change depending on what type of user is using your system.
First and foremost, for those that have not used SkyOS before, one major strength is obviously the LiveCD function that is currently being developed and tested, which allows users to run SkyOS directly from a CD or DVD as a read/write system, and give them a taste of what exactly SkyOS is all about.
From a desktop computer user’s perspective, the biggest strength that SkyOS brings to the table is probably that it does a good job of being flexible. By flexible, that means trying to lower the barrier for entry for a new user, while still remaining flexible and powerful for a more experienced “power user”.
From a developer’s standpoint, one of the major strengths would be integration. SkyOS uses a system of “services”, such as the ISS (multimedia), SpellChecker, Indexing, etc. and all of these various services are at the developer’s disposal through a fresh, modern, consistent API. The fact that it is fresh is important, because there are no legacies, no relics, that cripple the power at the developers’ fingertips.
More holistically, and borrowed from the desktop perspective, as SkyOS moves forward and matures, it will prove itself to be a very flexible system that can be used on platforms not necessarily limited to the traditional computer desktop. For instance, the development team has already looked into and designed early concepts for an application that would function in a way that would turn SkyOS into a media center, for use in a home theater setup. Similar to this, efforts have been made to allow SkyOS to function in “kiosk-mode”, for use in locations such as a shopping mall to provide information.
As time continues to move on, it is conceivable that SkyOS could even be engineered to run on devices not limited to a computer at all…
2. What are SkyOS’ weak points?
Robert: Obviously at this point, the fact that it is still in development. While SkyOS is currently very capable, and is even close to being at a state where it could be used for simple everyday desktop purposes, there are still many bugs left to work out, and simple features that need to be added and tweaked. Thanks to the efforts of the 1,000+ member beta team, many thousands of bugs have already been fixed. Without the efforts that they have provided in diligently provided, SkyOS would be much further behind than where it is today!
3. What applications are sorely lacking from SkyOS?
Robert: At this point, SkyOS has most of the applications necessary to provide at least limited functionality for a desktop user. These include a web browser, e-mail client, photo editing (Pixel), 3D creation suite, simple text editor, media player, etc. If someone wanted to use SkyOS today, with a defined set of hardware and the debug information stripped out, it could certainly provide for a generally positive experience.
That said, some of the more powerful tools that users have come to expect would be nice to have available. An office suite such as OpenOffice is the obvious first application that would be good to see. In the future, more powerful multimedia tools would also be great to see, though already, the Pixel image editing application has been ported to SkyOS, and does a great job providing users with a more powerful image-editing capability within the system.
These are all applications that we certainly would love to see 3rd-party developers or development teams pick up and bring to the system. Though we have recently closed the beta developer program for the time-being, if any developers or development teams are sincerely interested in bring software to SkyOS, feel free to contact us and we will find a way to get SkyOS to you. We love to see what our community is able to come up with!
4. If there were two features you could magically get from other operating systems, what would they be and why?
Robert: Drivers, for an obvious reason, and if there was something like a “convert Windows DirectX to a native fully integrated SkyOS Framework”…
5. What project, feature, or application currently in development for SkyOS excites you the most, and why?
Robert: First let me say that everything excites me about the development of SkyOS, if this wouldn’t be the case I would be definitely the wrong person for it.
Definitely the new System Profiler. Normally whenever you watch an Operating System in action you have no idea what is going on in the background. From time to time there are situations where you just wish to be able to hold the System and see whats going on.
This is what the Profiler is for. With more than 300 different kernel measure points and a full application/library/kernel sample profiler you can virtually look into the system and see what it is doing exactly.
Every action, be it a simple interrupt, an exception, a system call, a thread switch, etc. is recorded and can be visualized in a graph with a microseconds time resolution in the X and a thread list in the Y axis. In this graph you see every process state transition, thread changes, application call stacks and many more.
In contrast to a normal profiler where you just see a call stack like Function A -> Function B -> Function C, you can now also see what happened inside this functions, which thread interrupted you, and more important, why did it interrupt you?, how long did the interruption take, what happened right inside the kernel in this time? Etc..
As you can see this Profiler has a lot of potential, making it rather easy to identify system and even application bottlenecks, which should allow developers to perfectly optimize their applications.
Thanks to Robert for taking the time to answer the five questions.
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
Although I can only speak for myself, I do find SkyOS to be one of the most exciting (and prettiest*) new OSs in development. I particularly looking forward to the media centre side of the OS being completed.
I wish Robert and all the rest of the SkyOS team the best of success (hopefully the Live CD will bring new fans to their camp)
*I know looks aren’t the be all and end all, but it’s always a nice bonus
You definitely speak for yourself on the prettiest part (yuck @ the default theme), but I agree that it’s exciting. I can’t wait to see where it ends up.
It will end up as expensive OS without many useful apps. It will send it to an early grave.
It will send it to an early grave.
Early? SkyOS is more than 10 years old.
Sixth question (this is meant well – I’m a big SkyOS fan)
** Why on earth not a dual license instead of the insane closed source approach? **
I truly believe that SkyOS would stand a better chance than, say, Haiku at surviving as an “alternative” OS and at attracting developers if it was open, at least having an open “community” version which would include the kernel and drivers, but zero or few apps (I’m sure there are other commerical models, including service, etc)
Edited 2007-07-05 14:11
As an open source application, SkyOS made less headway than even ReactOS.
As a closed source application, SkyOS has made more headway than that last four owners of Amiga combined.
Additionally, open-source inevitably means fragmentation, as forks lead to very similar but still incompatible versions of what otherwise would have been the same system.
Edited 2007-07-05 14:17
“As an open source application, SkyOS made less headway than even ReactOS. As a closed source application, SkyOS has made more headway than that last four owners of Amiga combined. ”
That’s because it was open source only EARLY in the process. In the same spirit, I can claim that Linux made less headway when it was closed (the first five months or so), and a LOT of headway when it was opened.
“Additionally, open-source inevitably means fragmentation, as forks lead to very similar but still incompatible versions of what otherwise would have been the same system.”
Inevitably? Despite popular belief, there is only ONE Linux kernel, for instance (but many distributions – a different thing)
ReactOS and Haiku are not fragmented, and they have even designed rules to prevent it in the future.
If you really would like to prevent distributions and forks, then it’s a matter of license design (don’t know why you would want that – forks still means stuff gets done)
See? Your logic makes no sense.
** Why on earth not a dual license instead of the insane closed source approach? **
I’m surprised that open-sourcing is not the key to solve people’s starvation too…
“I’m surprised that open-sourcing is not the key to solve people’s starvation too…”
Generalization is a common logical fallacy, TBPrince. Don’t do that.
No, but it could help saving governments’s money and educate people.
“
”
I think that’s more than just a little presumptuous – especially given that at the moment it’s one of the cheapest commercial OSs.
It would have been nice if you went into a little more detail to explain why you’re predicting it such a demise.
People only buy Windows (except when they pirate it, and except when they get it with a new computer: they still pay for it, but they are not fully aware) and, very occasionally, OS X updates.
They expect to get every other OS for free. And let’s be honest, sometimes they get something really good for free. Take Debian as an example, which supports 11 Architectures, with over 20,000 applications available for each one.
Concluding: even €30 is a lot for people who aren’t used to pay, especially considering that SkyOS is bound to have few apps and limited hardware support.
Edited 2007-07-05 22:40
As my momma used to say, if you don’t have anything good to say, post it in a forum!
;}
SkyOS has some major problems and I wish Robert would actually admit it. It’s not fair to people because unlike most software, there is no “try before you buy”. I think this is by design, because if he would let people try his OS first I doubt many people would pay up. The beta forums are riddled with people who can’t even get SkyOS to boot.
“The beta forums are riddled with people who can’t even get SkyOS to boot.”
Right.
I have the same problem with Haiku. But with Haiku and a bit of patience, I could actually go in, debug the damn thing and figure out what’s wrong. Because I have the source.
I’m not sure SkyOS has serious “by design” flaws, but without the source, it’s really hard to tell.
And without the source, there’s no way I’m ever going to back an alternative OS. We’ve all seen what happens when the $$ runs out. No more OS.
This is a good point, and often repeated.
But consider this: there are already free software OS choices that are superior to Windows, and yet Windows still commands the lion’s share of desktops. This says to me that some people will only be comfortable with a closed-source, commercial OS. For generic PC hardware they currently only have one choice.
It would be refreshing to have some competition in the category of closed-source commercial OSes. It might also hasten the day when the average user understands that computer and Windows are not synonyms. Regardless of whether open or closed, no one is going to take SkyOS seriously until it is solid, but that’s expected. I wish SkyOS well. I hope it gets to the point that it is a solid alternative for some.
“This says to me that some people will only be comfortable with a closed-source, commercial OS”
That logic is flawed. These “some” people generally don’t have a real choice. They buy a computer, and Windoze is pre-installed.
Let’s hope Dell succeeds with their alternative.
Forums are an inherently flawed way of judging the quality of anything. Nobody goes into a forum to say how great something is, they just go for help for their problems.
Thus, any forum will be “riddled” with people reporting problems, because thats what the forum is for.
SkyOS pretty much doesn’t run on anything but virtualized hardware. At least I’ve never been able get it to boot on the 20 or so computers I’ve tried it on. Any bug reports that I’ve submitted got ignored or “resolved” but not actually fixed. This is unacceptable for a “commerical” product.
Ironically, I can only get it to run on real hardware, not virtualized.
SkyOS pretty much doesn’t run on anything but virtualized hardware. At least I’ve never been able get it to boot on the 20 or so computers I’ve tried it on. Any bug reports that I’ve submitted got ignored or “resolved” but not actually fixed. This is unacceptable for a “commerical” product.
I highly doubt this statement.
I have been active in the SkyOS community for *years*, since the 2.x days, so I kind of know what I’m talking about. I’m not nearly as active as I used to be (I pop into irc every now and then, only).
You can blame Robert and his team of a lot of things that at least *I* would have done differently, but you can *not* claim that Robert does not listen to bug reports, or that he is unwilling to help. I have installed a gazillion million copies of SkyOS since I first laid my eyes upon it, and if it failed somewhere along the way, Robert was *always* willing to help.
Heck, right *now*, he is helping me with an issue concerning the Intel i810 video chipset (SkyOS fails to boot on these chipsets). He is currently making a floppy boot image for me, so that I can get SkyOS installed.
As en ex-active SkyOS community member, and an active Haiku contributor, I have seen, in both communities, a lot of people who come barging into irc or a forum, saying something along the lines of “SkyOS/Haiku won’t boot, help me now.”, without providing any debug information, hardware information, or whatever. These kind of people usually fail to contribute in any meaningful way in the troubleshoot/bugfixing process. These processes are a two-way street, sirhomer. If you fail to realise that, you’ll never get SkyOS to boot on anything.
Edited 2007-07-05 17:28
Well Thom Holwerda, may I mention that you are Thom Holwerda. You are pretty much free advertising for Robert, of course he’s going to build custom kernels for you. I wonder why instead of compiling kernels for people why doesn’t he just fix the main release, especially considering that he said there will be a release today.
Well Thom Holwerda, may I mention that you are Thom Holwerda. You are pretty much free advertising for Robert, of course he’s going to build custom kernels for you. I wonder why instead of compiling kernels for people why doesn’t he just fix the main release, especially considering that he said there will be a release today.
He helped me as well as others even before I even became part of the OSN team; I only joined OSN two years ago, and before that, I was a nobody like everybody else (I still am, by the way). He still jumped through hoops, whether he was helping me, or someone else.
Look, I’ve had my share of disagreements with the SkyOS team, but please don’t spread nonsense like Robert doesn’t help. It’s just nonsense.
I am not saying he doesn’t help. I’m saying that even after ten years of development SkyOS can’t even boot on a large assortment of computers. Robert talks about stuff like running media centers and nex-gen video games on SkyOS – but if I can’t boot into the damn thing, what good is that? Talk about flawed priorities. And he doesn’t keep to his word. Sure he helped you. I’m not denying that. But instead of releasing a new version of SkyOS today like he promised.
I’m saying that even after ten years of development SkyOS can’t even boot on a large assortment of computers.
Do you even have the slightest idea of how much work it actually is to get a kernel to boot? How many kernels have you written lately that boot on as many x86 machines as Windows and/or Linux? Remember, the core OS itself is a one-man show, you can’t expect miracles. Do you want me to detail how much work I need to go through *every* time I want to load a Linux distribution on my bog-standard Athlon PC? I need to pass certain kernel paramaters and even then it’s a hit and miss situation.
And Linux has been in development a whole lot longer than SkyOS, by a whole lot more people and companies!
This looks like a classic case of xyz-doesn’t-boot-on-my-config-and-now-I’m-pissed-off. But, how many debug logs [1] have you sent to Robert? Did you give him any information at all that could help him in fixing your bug? Have you tried using slightly different configurations, passing kernel parameters [2], to try to pinpoint the problem?
[1] http://www.skyos.org/?q=node/487 (heh I wrote this guide years ago)
[2] http://www.skyos.org/?q=node/491
Why don’t you stop looking at the difficulty of creating the OS and start looking at the actual OS itself. That’s the weirdest part of the SkyOS community, it’s really not a OS community, it’s a Robert community. You can’t criticize SkyOS without someone pointing how difficult it is to create an OS and how it’s a “one man show” by our glorious leader Robert. It’s like a Steve Jobs-like reality distortion field, except at a much more insane level. And it seems an OSNews editor fell for it.
Why don’t you stop looking at the difficulty of creating the OS and start looking at the actual OS itself.
Well, the fact that an operating system is hard to write is the *prime* reason why alternative operating systems don’t have the ability to boot on everything like Linux and Windows have. You cannot simply close your eyes for reality.
You can’t criticize SkyOS without someone pointing how difficult it is to create an OS and how it’s a “one man show” by our glorious leader Robert.
Because the fact that he does it by himself is the limiting factor! Are you just really stupid, or am I really smart? As much as I would like to believe the latter, I will opt for the former.
As I have said, I have had a number of disagreements with the SkyOS team and Robert (that’s why I stopped spending my time on helping them out in the first place), and if there is one person in this forum or in the SkyOS irc channel who has openly criticised SkyOS, Robert, and some of his decisions, it is me, sonny.
It’s like a Steve Jobs-like reality distortion field, except at a much more insane level. And it seems an OSNews editor fell for it.
No, sonny, I’m just grown up, and I have both feet firmly planted in the ground. I know enough about the operating system world to realise I can’t expect miracles from Robert, so if SkyOS doesn’t boot on my hardware (as is currently the case) I don’t go curl up in fetal position crying in the corner and point fingers; I contact Robert, explain the problems I’m having, and supply him with as much information as I can.
I didn’t fall for any “reality distortion fields”. I know the flaws in SkyOS and its developer, but I am also mature enough to realise that me regurgitating old disagreements won’t do anybody any good. Instead, I swallow the disagreements, and try to help out.
The world would be a better place if we all did just that.
I’d like to for once have a honest debate without my maturity and intelligence put to question. It doesn’t say much about you if you are spending so much effort refuting a ignorent and immature peon like me, does it? So please refrain from personal attacks, Thom.
I will ask you the same question again, like I did for the last SkyOS related post you decided to whine about instead of actually helping you and us to solve your problems.
Did you submit any bug reports?
If not, please visit the SkyOS BugTracker and simply submit your bug with a debug log. Most likely it will then be fixed in the next version.
Edited 2007-07-05 20:19
“I’m saying that even after ten years of development SkyOS can’t even boot on a large assortment of computers.”
So, people with an actual brain investigates this *before* buying it thus avoiding being angry at SkyOS for their own failure to be informed consumers.
“Talk about flawed priorities”
His project, his priorities.
“And he doesn’t keep to his word. Sure he helped you. I’m not denying that. But instead of releasing a new version of SkyOS today like he promised.”
Do you have any actually tangible proof to back your accusations up?
got some links to some of these bug reports? and 20+ computers? I dont think so. I have had one computer that didnt boot skyos so far, and that was fixed in the next release.. hell I have actually had the Debian installer fail to run or lock up on more computers than the skyos installer.. it happens, but it seems kinda silly to knock a OS still under development for bugs and incompatabilities.. if you dont like the possibility of problems then dont use pre release. If you wanna be helped, then help them determine your problem.
damn its like people believe beta and alpha are just launch codes to thier new dream OS world where bugs go away with a tiki torch and some OFF.
Does Robert code on SkyOS full time or is this an after-hours hobby?
Hobby. Robert has a full time day job.
How do the two compare? It would seem like a dtrace app could do all this and more, but I’m not that experienced with Dtrace.
You all bitching that SkyOS isn’t “Free” or “Open Source” are simply a bunch of losers. If you simply look at the forum, you can get a free subscription by simply contributing something, whether some code, some documentation, or whateverthehell.
Simply put, if you want to be a whiner/complainer, you either pay up, or you actually do something for the project. Either way, both situations help the project go forward.
Good god, what a bunch of whiners. This mentality that all software should be open source is painful and degrade from these forums. If you don’t like a product because it’s closed source, look elsewhere.
I have no interest in SkyOS for now; it doesn’t offer me anything. I’m stuck with WinXP due to digital recording and games. Maybe I’ll look again in 5 years who knows. I agree it’s fairly ugly, but that’ll no doubt change.
After changing my computer many moons ago the new beta build is the first SkyOS beta cd that boots.
For a one man show I can only say: “Good job!”
The hardware is a Turion 64×2 with 2 gig of ram and nvidia ToGo-6150 chipset/graphic.
The things that don’t work are: networking (suppose the nvidia chipset is to new), thouchpad (but a usb trackball works great).
And of course not implemented stuff like wifi (iss fails to start too).
But I’m ok with that, because to date there is not even one Linux distro that works 100% out of the box either.
Robert, thank you for SkyOS.
Please keep working on it.
I really liked SkyOS at one point. I tested it on multiple machines, created detailed bug reports, and ran numerous test kernels that Robert sent to me to resolve some of the biggest problems I encountered.
And while I still do like SkyOS, I just don’t have that time and patience any more. If I could actually use SkyOS in a day-to-day environment, I’d be more than willing to continue testing it. But with the migration to a new computer, SkyOS no longer supports *any* of my networking, sound, or video components. IMAP e-mail in thunderbird is (or at least was) broken. I went so far as to create an account for Robert on one of the imap mail servers I have access to. But without that basic functionality, I can’t regularly use SkyOS for actual *work* and have lost interest in testing each new release to see what hardware of mine has become supported and what bugs of mine have been resolved. Too many times, nothing had changed.
As for the closed source vs. open source debate. I couldn’t really care. What I do care about is what happens to the operating system once Robert gets bored or just becomes incapable of continuing his work. This is a question that I’ve never actually gotten a response to. *That* would have been a better question for this interview 🙂
Adam
“As for the closed source vs. open source debate. I couldn’t really care. What I do care about is what happens to the operating system once Robert gets bored or just becomes incapable of continuing his work.”
In which case you SHOULD care about the closed vs. open source debate after all, since then it would not likely be a one-man show anymore.
Being open source does not guarantee that any project will continue after the primary developer(s) stop working on it.
In addition, being closed source does not guarantee that a project will die if the primary developer(s) stop working on it.
So I still don’t care about the open source vs closed source debate.
“Being open source does not guarantee that any project will continue after the primary developer(s) stop working on it.”
But you would have to agree it vastly improves the chances, no?
“In addition, being closed source does not guarantee that a project will die if the primary developer(s) stop working on it. ”
But you would have to agree it vastly improves the chances, no?
“So I still don’t care about the open source vs closed source debate.”
Sorry. Your logic makes no sense.
No; no; and no.
You’re missing the point.
What I care about is the fact that there appears to be no plan in place for Robert’s eventual inability to continue working on SkyOS. Open sourcing SkyOS now is one (possible) solution. There are others.
Adam
Like someone said earlier on. What’s interesting is what happens if Robert gets tired of coding.
Either way, looking at, for instance, Haiku. We can simply note that Haiku is Open Source and that doesn’t stop the debate anyway. Now there are people on a regular basis (and not to mention has been) who keep saying that it’s the wrong license, and it should be GPL or it should be bla bla.
The license debate has gone way too far. IF the fact that SkyOS is closed source is the reason why you don’t wanna use the product, then there seems to be a lot of products out there that you miss out on. If it’s philosophy, then stick to Linux and let the rest of us who are not zeals stop hearing the license crap thank you very much.
Robert, I haven’t tried your OS, but I do enjoy watching the demovids every now and then. Maybe when you reach an even more mature stage and open up for new customers I’ll buy a copy, no matter OSS or Proprietary!