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Show HN: GodotOS – Fake operating system interface made in the Godot engine

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Re: Show HN: GodotOS – Fake operating system interface made in the Godot engine

#61

Post by integricho »

lolinder wrote: post #59
ladberg wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be sooo much worse from a UI point of view. All nice OS features (good text rendering, uniform text editing interface, accessibility, transparency) would all get chucked out the window. I also don't think Godot is inherently more performant for any random UI than Electron is. It happens that most Godot apps are performant because they're made by the type of people who want to use videogame engines and thus…

Exactly. People hate on Electron because they have bad experiences with many Electron apps, but that's not because Electron is inherently terrible, it's because most developers choose Electron because it requires the lowest amount of effort. When you start with that as your single reason for choosing a tech stack, it's unsurprising that optimizing performance never happens. VSCode works because they chose Electron fo…

I think it's very subjective what is considered performant. I for one don't think about VSCode as a performant app, for me it is a resource hog, not at all that responsive app, there's always a slight delay / lag in input reaction, simply not a fast application.

Re: Show HN: GodotOS – Fake operating system interface made in the Godot engine

#62

Post by 654wak654 »

jadtl wrote: post #57
Gormo wrote: post #51

This is actually a great proof of concept for using Godot as a cross-platform framework for desktop applications. The distribution package is incredibly simple -- just a single executable and a data file -- and performance is excellent. This seems much superior to Flatpak and the like as a way to offer fully self-contained distro-agnostic binary packages, and vastly superior to Electron in the performance department.…

I was trying to think of arguments against it, so I thought about the fact immediate mode GUIs might not always be suitable, before I stumbled upon this post: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47444189/what-are-the-pe... The only other downside I can think about is from a design standpoint, the application has to have the same design language across platforms, so it cannot have a native look for each. Any other con…

Some quick googling tells me Godot doesn't have native tray icons/notifications support or access to peripherals like webcams & printers. Buut if you're using Godot over electron/flutter/QT your app is probably focusing on 3D / physics topics. You can implement plugins for those other niche desktop features as you need them.

Re: Show HN: GodotOS – Fake operating system interface made in the Godot engine

#63

Post by vcg3rd »

ladberg wrote: post #58
Gormo wrote: post #51

This is actually a great proof of concept for using Godot as a cross-platform framework for desktop applications. The distribution package is incredibly simple -- just a single executable and a data file -- and performance is excellent. This seems much superior to Flatpak and the like as a way to offer fully self-contained distro-agnostic binary packages, and vastly superior to Electron in the performance department.…

This would be sooo much worse from a UI point of view. All nice OS features (good text rendering, uniform text editing interface, accessibility, transparency) would all get chucked out the window. I also don't think Godot is inherently more performant for any random UI than Electron is. It happens that most Godot apps are performant because they're made by the type of people who want to use videogame engines and thus…

> All nice OS features (good text rendering, uniform text editing interface, accessibility, transparency) would all get chucked out the window.

Could you explain this to someone who doesn't program and knows nothing about how os internals?

My naive question is wouldn't the OS/DE/WM still take care of the above for an application?

Re: Show HN: GodotOS – Fake operating system interface made in the Godot engine

#64

Post by lolinder »

integricho wrote: post #61
lolinder wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. People hate on Electron because they have bad experiences with many Electron apps, but that's not because Electron is inherently terrible, it's because most developers choose Electron because it requires the lowest amount of effort. When you start with that as your single reason for choosing a tech stack, it's unsurprising that optimizing performance never happens. VSCode works because they chose Electron fo…

I think it's very subjective what is considered performant. I for one don't think about VSCode as a performant app, for me it is a resource hog, not at all that responsive app, there's always a slight delay / lag in input reaction, simply not a fast application.

So that the rest of us can calibrate, what text editors do you use that you consider to be performant?

Re: Show HN: GodotOS – Fake operating system interface made in the Godot engine

#66

Post by corethree »

ladberg wrote: post #58
Gormo wrote: post #51

This is actually a great proof of concept for using Godot as a cross-platform framework for desktop applications. The distribution package is incredibly simple -- just a single executable and a data file -- and performance is excellent. This seems much superior to Flatpak and the like as a way to offer fully self-contained distro-agnostic binary packages, and vastly superior to Electron in the performance department.…

This would be sooo much worse from a UI point of view. All nice OS features (good text rendering, uniform text editing interface, accessibility, transparency) would all get chucked out the window. I also don't think Godot is inherently more performant for any random UI than Electron is. It happens that most Godot apps are performant because they're made by the type of people who want to use videogame engines and thus…

No it's better for an os UI. A web page UI is better with electron where you click on a link an open a page. But floating windows with resizeable and highly dynamic UIs Godot is likely easier, better and much more well suited.

HTML was never intended for dynamic interfaces. Whenever you diverge beyond what it does best which is hypertext, things become more and more hacky and awkward. If you wanted to design an os UI in electron, you would use a framework called react, and you would use a language called JavaScript that compiles down into typescript and you'd need a whole build ecosystem and connect everything together, then you might find HTML to awkward so you have to switch to webgl which is too low level or you might switch to svg... In both cases you miss the text rendering from HTML. If you stick with HTML then you'd be using css to move shit around and create windows which is also incredibly awkward.

People use electron because it's easy. The reason why it's easy is because of familiarity not because of actual superiority.

Web UI is one of the most hacked together technology stacks ever. Developers with nothing better to do keep coming up with new abstractions trying to build for a moving target. It's not unique in this regard but it doesn't change the reality. Godot has the benefit of a very specific design implementation for a target that is highly dynamic and likely will never change. Plus it's new so you don't have armies of developers trying to "abstract" shit on it over years and years of horizontal progress.

Re: Show HN: GodotOS – Fake operating system interface made in the Godot engine

#67

Post by arminiusreturns »

Very nice! (and AGPLv3 too!!)

I have been working on a similar project for actual filesystem/OS interaction (heavily abusing OS.execute (https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_os.html)) which is actually a sub-project of a much bigger project (only working part-time now so I can spend half my day on it as I near alpha). My favorite part so far has been in my attempts at using Godot to recreate fsv/fsn (3d filesystem representation).

Is there any reason you haven't tried to turn it into a real desktop environment given that Godot provides the mechanisms to do so? I know I've been nervous that I might have a bug that does something destructive and that is why I've been working on my ci/cd pipeline and unit tests but am just curious.

Either way, it has been awesome watching the explosion of creativity happening in Godot land. I compile daily and watch the commits and see such vast improvements being made all the time. It's a great engine with first class c++17 support with GDNative and modules, and I truly believe the future of gaming (and many other things) is FOSS. My only meta-wish is that the engine was GPL instead of MIT, but luckily that doesn't stop me from releasing my stuff built in it as GPL.

Re: Show HN: GodotOS – Fake operating system interface made in the Godot engine

#68

Post by arminiusreturns »

gumballindie wrote: post #12

Just the other day I was wondering - what would it take to develop a Linux WM in Godot?

Not that much actually if you don't mean as a full WM/DE replacement and instead as an on top layer; Godot 4.2 window management on linux is working quite smoothly for me, including multi-window support. From there what you do within the windows is where the magic happens. (see my other post)

Re: Show HN: GodotOS – Fake operating system interface made in the Godot engine

#69

Post by brucethemoose2 »

ladberg wrote: post #58
Gormo wrote: post #51

This is actually a great proof of concept for using Godot as a cross-platform framework for desktop applications. The distribution package is incredibly simple -- just a single executable and a data file -- and performance is excellent. This seems much superior to Flatpak and the like as a way to offer fully self-contained distro-agnostic binary packages, and vastly superior to Electron in the performance department.…

This would be sooo much worse from a UI point of view. All nice OS features (good text rendering, uniform text editing interface, accessibility, transparency) would all get chucked out the window. I also don't think Godot is inherently more performant for any random UI than Electron is. It happens that most Godot apps are performant because they're made by the type of people who want to use videogame engines and thus…

> I don't think Godot is inherently more performant for any random UI than Electron

It probably depends on the app?

Electron will obviously excel at things that resemble an oldschool web page, but one would think Godot would excel at more dynamic OS UIs? If something is already sluggish or GPU heavy in Electron, I would think its right up Godot's alley.

Accessibility of course is a seperate and huge concern.

Re: Show HN: GodotOS – Fake operating system interface made in the Godot engine

#70

Post by allan_s »

lolinder wrote: post #64
integricho wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's very subjective what is considered performant. I for one don't think about VSCode as a performant app, for me it is a resource hog, not at all that responsive app, there's always a slight delay / lag in input reaction, simply not a fast application.

So that the rest of us can calibrate, what text editors do you use that you consider to be performant?

Sublime text or neovim for me (even with all debugger, language server, tabnine etc installed so to be also a full 2024 ide )
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