Not impressed by pace, reserving judgement on anything else
So The Reg counts 3 years between 0.5 and 0.8 and Redox is not quite there yet. If memory serves, Linus Torvalds started his "student project" in 1991. By 1994 Linux was my major platform in the academia. It was not just usable - it had the same UI as the most advanced Sun workstations of the time (and was vastly superior to Windows of the period that I tried and abandoned in disgust) and ran on cheaper hardware (no VMs on COTS HW at that time). You had your personal resource rather than an X Terminal to share a departmental Sun. You could compile the kernel and everything else on it, too - something Redox can't do yet, according to the article.
By 1995 it was difficult to find anything but Linux at 2 US universities I was then affiliated with. In 1996 - and ever since - it was ubiquitous in at least some industries.
Yes, I suppose the distance to cover was shorter then and the requirements today are different. E.g., Internet was simpler. But maybe the overall architecture of GUI on top on Open Look on top of X on top of kernel, with shells and tools thrown in, helped making it all usable fast? I am pretty sure that keeping those old system calls (I've given the "Why Redox?" page linked in the article a superficial glance) that allowed other stuff to run helped a lot. And therefore I am curious: does Redox have a version of libc (and maybe sockets and some other stuff) that sits atop its new syscalls? That has been done, too, e.g., for InfiniBand to bypass the kernel without re-writing applications. Would such a "distraction" help running "legacy" (FOSS) stuff for usability's sake without hindering the interesting OS R&D?
In any case, somehow (less than) 3 years from inception to being perfectly adequate for everything I needed for my thesis, later academic research, and still later industry work (none in computer science, though computer-heavy) seems to me a bit more impressive - in terms of pace of development only, mind you - than what this article presents about Redox.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
