Comment by mghackerlady
2 days ago
OS design basically stagnated in the 90s. Sure, we had NT, but that was putting a dos flavoured suit on VMS. BeOS was promising, but fizzled out quickly. Everything else has either been research or for the embedded market.
Android and iOS increased security, but at the cost of much flexibility and user agency. It's some kind of progress, but I certainly wouldn't want them for Real Computers.
Android is just Linux running a Java VM and a funky userland. iOS is just MacOS apple decided you can't do real work on. Both are still unix clones (as contrast to a unix-like like plan9 or haiku)
The kernel is obviously close to vanilla Linux, but one could also define the OS as "which lower-level services and interfaces the applications see and are programmed to use" - so the stuff on top of Linux matters.
There are more interesting, general, and lower level innovations out there - sure. But the mobile OSes do have improved security from some kind of permission system, VM (only partially because native components are common), one user account per app (IIRC) and such.
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