I decided to finally make some time to play around with alternative OSes again and possibly start running one as my main OS platform. I've been meaning to do it for over a year now, but always had something 'more important to do'. Recently though, I've had a desire to help out on an alternative OS project that suits my needs and desires, or at the very least run an alternative OS since in Microsoft Windows world the cost to run this platform is increasing and so is the computer power required to run it.
While there was a time a place for a commercial OS that required bi-yearly updates that required you to buy the OS each time, that time has passed. I believe the OS should be free, or at the very least open. By being open it allows people to modify and work on the OS to suit their own purposes, be it commercial, work related or just personal geek reasons. My biggest desire is for the OS to be CPU speed independent. The base OS responsiveness shouldn't show any major difference in performance if you have a Pentium II or a Core 2 Duo. Applications, games in particular, are a different story.
The OS should also be easy to use and allow me to easily add a new piece of hardware, even temporarily, without having to reboot the computer numerous times to install the driver or force me dig through the filesystem to find out where the driver for the newly acquired hardware should be placed.
A larger order would be complete hardware independence. A dream of mine is to have a 1GB chip with the entire OS + most of my vital data on the chip and be able to plug it into any computer I go up to and boot into *my* system from there. Pretty tall order, but I like to aim high.
