Phantom takes aim at Microsoft

Posted by Paul Foty in February 4th 2009

There is a new operating system making the news today called Phantom which is aiming to knock Microsoft off of it’s throne. The idea is that it is a real time operating system where the state is always preserved and is instantly on. The concept is pretty advanced but it has been attempted before by other operating systems however up to this point none of them have gone main stream.

To be able to preserve the state of the machine, snapshots are constantly being written to disk. With the current implementation of snapshots, modern operating systems need to pause to keep it from being corrupted. Phantom however has been designed around this obstacle to prevent it from being an issue. System performance is one of my biggest concerns with the need for this much constant activity.

The operating system is physically functional in it’s current state but the Graphical User Interface (GUI) is not completed yet. The OS has a long ways to go before it will even have a chance to compete against Microsoft, Apple or Linux. While Phantom’s creator Dmitry Zavalishin is determined to bring the OS to market it needs to be more than revolutionary for people to buy it.

Marketing is everything when it comes to an operating system and right now Apple and Microsoft have the advantage. Most normal consumers are unaware that there is anything more than those two and think Linux is only for geeks.

http://www.osattack.com/alternative-os/phantom-takes-aim-at-microsoft/