Syllable operating system

The global assortment of operating systems is presented both by sales-oriented commercial names (for example, Mac OS X) and previously not claiming to be anything special, but extraordinarily popular today is GNU / Linux, FreeBSD. To date, count the number and clearly classify existing operating systems is not possible because of their very large number.

From time to time come across interesting projects. One of which was the desktop operating system called Syllable. For a start, I want to tell you about the history of its occurrence.

In 2002, the creator and chief developer of the AtheOS operating system, Kurt Skauen suspends work on it. AtheOS developers and users are left without any project news. Of course, admirers and fans of the system are not satisfied with this deal of affairs, because the system was gradually gaining increasing popularity. Subsequently, a new project was created called Syllable, on which hackers and AtheOS developers began working. The new project was led by Kristian Van Der Vliet (aka "Vanders").


AtheOS itself was conceived as an open AmigaOS clone for PC based on x86 processors, but later this idea faded into the background. AtheOS development is currently completely stopped, and Syllable is considered to be its successor. The story of the appearance of the name “Syllable” is interesting. Vanders once thought about how many syllables would be enough in the name of the new operating system when he realized that “syllable” is an attractive and memorable word in itself! (The word “syllable” in English means “syllable.”)
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In general, Vanders believes that the most popular GNU / Linux is too complicated an operating system for a simple desktop user. “Why would a user redo half of the system to install a new version of Gnucash?” He says. The purpose of GNU / Linux, in his opinion, is servers, and Syllable is designed for desktop PCs. Any attempt to make GNU / Linux user-friendly is not a good idea, he explains his position. It is possible that modern UNIX-like systems have a lot of features that are not needed by ordinary desktop users. Thus, we see a clear position Syllable - is office and home PC.


What are the features of Syllable? Why don't they use a lot of what is already done (for example, the same X11)? The difference is that Syllable is a fully thought-out operating system with its own architecture and subsystems (unlike GNU / Linux, which is an assembly of many components and elements that are distributions). Less complexity with the interaction of different parts, because in Syllable, they are all made for one operating system at once, the way it should be. And if you have to rewrite something (especially the API), it will be easier than in GNU / Linux, because everything is done within the same team of developers and one project.

Syllable contains such things as bash, glibc. The main compiler is gcc. Many things are used from the GNU project. Syllable - POSIX compatible. This makes it easy to migrate and port applications from existing UNIX systems. As an enthusiastic programmer, the presence of SDL was very pleased. (Simple Directmedia Library is a convenient interlayer library to simplify cross-platform development of multimedia applications and other software.)


There are two versions of Syllable - Syllable Desktop and Syllable Server. The first is the main direction of the project, and the server version is a relatively new development based on the Linux kernel (since 2007). Many will ask why make the next distribution of GNU / Linux in the form of Syllable Server? The developers explain this by the fact that two different versions of Syllable have good mutual integration with respect to other operating systems.

At the moment, Syllable Desktop is quite slow in work (at least in VirtualBox), and it is not yet possible to use it in everyday life. But the developers do not pretend to something unusual - the system is in active development and in the future everything can change drastically.


I would like to hope that the system will evolve even more rapidly. Developers will have to sweat, so that Syllable could make a real competition to the popular and "dopilennoy" GNU / Linux. The system is still very far from full readiness. And it is unlikely to be able to surpass existing operating systems in the near future. We'll see…


PS: Everything expressed in this small post is the personal opinion of the author.

Related Links:

Syllable official website
Russian site about Syllable
Live Syllable assembly CD in different languages
LinuxFormat # 85 with Vanders interview with Syllable
Wikipedia Page
Syllable - The Little OS with a Big Future
Syllable small review