11–20 of 42 posts
God I would kill to make the pipe dream of competition in the OS space happen, there are many interesting hobbyist projects like this that just peak at some of the features and ideas that the current dominant operating systems don't touch.
Didn't know about this Handmade Seattle Conference until these recent links, but these OS demos have become my favorite posts on Hacker news. I'm sure most regular users saw the post, but there was one on SerenityOS that was also very cool.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnuhp3Xd9PYTt6svyQPyR...
Using the window as the application launcher is genius. Tabbed windows at the OS level is also great. I'm honestly blown away by this.
Using the window as the application launcher is genius. Tabbed windows at the OS level is also great. I'm honestly blown away by this.
This one person single-handedly “solved” the windows UI paradigm. This is how it should’ve been from the start. There was never any need for a non-window box like a start menu.
Microsoft, please hire this man and appoint him dictator of UX.
God I would kill to make the pipe dream of competition in the OS space happen, there are many interesting hobbyist projects like this that just peak at some of the features and ideas that the current dominant operating systems don't touch.
There are two huge hurdles that no hobby operating system can realistically overcome, without major tradeoffs (like being 100% POSIX-compatible): accelerated graphics, which in this day and age are required even for basic 2D rendering, especially if you have a hidpi monitor, and a web browser. Everything else, compared to those two problems, is easy stuff. Graphics is just incredibly complex, opaque and obtuse kernel…
Porting a web browser to work on your platform (chromium, webkit) doesn't require rewriting the whole thing, and chromium etc already are designed in a way to isolate browser code from OS-specific code (as we can see by chromium code for windows/linux/macOS/android being mostly shared).
On the other hand, making it so your OS works with the large number of common USB devices, networking chips, etc... it's a fantastical effort which linux only barely manages to accomplish.
God I would kill to make the pipe dream of competition in the OS space happen, there are many interesting hobbyist projects like this that just peak at some of the features and ideas that the current dominant operating systems don't touch.
At last count there are 5 major operating systems with >100M users, how many are required in order for there to be "competition"?
So, mostly three. Especially considering the BSDs' wide server presence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are two huge hurdles that no hobby operating system can realistically overcome, without major tradeoffs (like being 100% POSIX-compatible): accelerated graphics, which in this day and age are required even for basic 2D rendering, especially if you have a hidpi monitor, and a web browser. Everything else, compared to those two problems, is easy stuff. Graphics is just incredibly complex, opaque and obtuse kernel…
I would place "driver support" as on the same level. Porting a web browser to work on your platform (chromium, webkit) doesn't require rewriting the whole thing, and chromium etc already are designed in a way to isolate browser code from OS-specific code (as we can see by chromium code for windows/linux/macOS/android being mostly shared). On the other hand, making it so your OS works with the large number of common U…
Some people are born more creative and more clever than others. A leader
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would place "driver support" as on the same level. Porting a web browser to work on your platform (chromium, webkit) doesn't require rewriting the whole thing, and chromium etc already are designed in a way to isolate browser code from OS-specific code (as we can see by chromium code for windows/linux/macOS/android being mostly shared). On the other hand, making it so your OS works with the large number of common U…
This can be somewhat mitigated by running these OSes as VM guests, under Linux (or Windows) supervisor. That way, you only need to implement the virt devices. This makes some things not achievable (e.g. 0.7s startup time), but can make bootstrap phase of growth much easier.