www.anubis-os.org finally open

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There have been far too many assumptions with regards to what Anubis is aiming for, and as the new project lead, I intend to clarify these misconceptions with anyone willing to ask civil questions which do not assume ridiculous things.

Anubis looks very interesting - while I love some aspects of the AmigaOS user experience, it's apparent that some of the underlying system is woefully outdated and as far as I can tell none of the three existing systems have a clear roadmap for modernisation.  MorphOS seemed to have the roadmap originally although as far as I can tell most development so far has been on the ABox.  An OS that tries to place the best AmigaOS features on a modern foundation sounds like a great idea, however there's not a great deal of info on the Anubis website.  So here are a few questions

As far as I can tell from the website, Anubis is trying to build an AROS-derived userland on top of a Linux kernel - is that correct?  I guess that's similar in many ways to what MS did with Windows NT, using the same Win32 API on a new kernel.  OSX is another possible comparison, however as you mentioned the old-style Carbon API was only intended as a legacy solution.

Is there any particular reason why Linux has been chosen as the kernel?  I always thought that AmigaOS and clones were much more microkernel based, but presumably the Anubis team considers a monolithic design a better choice for various reasons?

From the perspective of a user, how similar is the system going to be to AmigaOS/AROS/MOS?  What bits of the interface/filesystem/etc do you think are worth keeping and what is likely to go?

In terms of actual code, how much are you planning to re-use from AROS?  From my highly limited knowledge of how Amigalike OSes work internally, doesn't much of the AmigaOS API rely on the fact that any task can quickly access the memory of another task, something that's not compatible with memory protection?  Will this be a big issue?

What about backwards-compatibility with existing AROS applications?  Will AROS applications be able to access some of the new features, a bit like on OS4?  Or is it intended for old applications to run in a sandbox, and build the next-generation stuff up separately (like the ABox/QBox idea in MOS)?  Or would they just have to be ran in a VMed instance of AROS?  Also, are you planning any integrated 68k emulation or would system-friendly 3.x apps need to be run in UAE?

Apologies for the insane number of questions, and I realise that the project's at a very early stage so it might not be possible to give detailed answers.  However without knowing this kind of thing it's extremely hard to properly understand what you're aiming for.

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Basically it came down to which kernel and drivers were going to be the best option.  One thing that has dogged AROS was the lack of drivers, especially gfx with hardware acceleration.  Going with Linux means we get OEM drivers from nVidia and AMD/ATI to use with a huge number of devs working on new or updated drivers.

Just to check, when you say "Linux" do you mean just the kernel or is Anubis also looking to use additional chunks of the entire GNU/Linux stack?  If that's the case, please please say it won't involve X11:)

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Another example of vapourware appart from technical specs, natami, anubis... whats following?

Seems far too early to be crying vapourware, although I think it would be good to see a clear statement of what they're aiming at with the OS and how that leads into the design decisions - especially which bits of GNU/Linux are junked and which are kept.

If the goal is simply to make features such as datatypes and assigns available on an OS which supports as much hardware as possible, it makes sense to use X, ALSA etc and basically write a desktop (along with alterations to the filesystem like in GoboLinux and applications that take advantage of the new features).  If, on the other hand, they want to include modern counterparts to what made AmigaOS so great in 1985 (responsiveness, ease-of-use etc) then it would seem better to work from a much lower foundation and create something unique.

I have particular issues with X.  I'm not qualified to say whether it can be streamlined into something modern, but my experiences on Linux desktops, general opinions I've seen on the internet, and the way that Apple chose to replace it with Quartz Extreme seems to suggest it might not be the best choice for a "modern" desktop OS.  Of course, if Anubis isn't aiming to be state-of-the-art then that's OK, but I'd still be interested to hear more from the devs.

I'm going to reserve judgement for now until I've heard more:)