Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

nakst.gitlab.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 299 posts

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#31

Post by EGreg »

the_biot wrote: post #25

This is an amazing piece of work, but it's clearly a labor of love: this isn't going to have any real-world use any time soon. Where operating systems are headed is more towards security (process isolation, bulletproof input etc), not lightweight GUIs on top of thin kernels like this. Are there any passion (or other) projects that explore this? I know about Qubes, but that's more like a heavy layer on top of a heavy…

Well if you are looking for a Social Operating System…

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

Labor of love for a decade

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#32

Post by codeonline »

nsonha wrote: post #23

What is a "desktop operating system"? Why do you need to reinvent operating system when all you create is a (rather traditional looking) desktop environment?

As a learning exercise As a labor of love To scratch an itch To explore an idea Many reasons

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#33

Post by ani-ani »

__float wrote: post #27
gk1256 wrote: post #24

I like the UI, but I'm disappointed to find that the author is using orthodox C++ instead Modern C++

What do you mean by "orthodox C++"?

"Although the operating system is written in C++, most C++ features are avoided."

From https://gitlab.com/nakst/essence/-/blob/master/help/Contribu...

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#35

Post by walrus01 »

markstos wrote: post #30
the_biot wrote: post #25

This is an amazing piece of work, but it's clearly a labor of love: this isn't going to have any real-world use any time soon. Where operating systems are headed is more towards security (process isolation, bulletproof input etc), not lightweight GUIs on top of thin kernels like this. Are there any passion (or other) projects that explore this? I know about Qubes, but that's more like a heavy layer on top of a heavy…

Spectrum OS, meant be a more usable upgrade from Qubes. Based on NixOS. Currently stuck on plumbing problems. https://spectrum-os.org/ Bheem OS, "a next generation secure operating system." Inspired some by Spectrum. So new they can't keep their blog online. Here's a snapshot of a recent blog post about the security features https://blog.openw3b.org/crosvm-for-os-and-app-virtualizatio...

the main problem I ran into with qubes is that having a xen hypervisor and an nvidia desktop graphics card in use (with proprietary nvidia drivers in use for proper performance) seem to be mutually exclusive. a xen dom0 needs to use the host system RAM in some way that causes kernel panics and crashes when the nvidia DKMS driver is loaded.

I would wager that 99% of xen related development is intended, as it should be, for dom0 server environments that will never have a keyboard, mouse or 3D capable video card plugged into the bare metal.

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#36

Post by beardog »

the_biot wrote: post #25

This is an amazing piece of work, but it's clearly a labor of love: this isn't going to have any real-world use any time soon. Where operating systems are headed is more towards security (process isolation, bulletproof input etc), not lightweight GUIs on top of thin kernels like this. Are there any passion (or other) projects that explore this? I know about Qubes, but that's more like a heavy layer on top of a heavy…

There was SubgraphOS which used namespaces, but it seems pretty dead.

Qubes is the best and most currently complete thing i've seen (In the last couple years its also made progress supporting GPU domain). Its not perfect and has some controversial opinions like default passwordless sudo in VMs, but it is still far ahead of most distro's security.

For me Qubes 4.1 performs well though I have it on an m.2 and have plenty of ram. It boots quickly, with the only seriously slow thing being VM startup. I'm able to do all my dev work and use Windows for work related things on it as well as have disposable browsers for banking and sketchy sites.

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#37

Post by Zomatree »

jhgb wrote: post #16

> Essence will happily run on low-powered hardware The thing is, when I see a mention of "low-powered hardware", I'm instantly thinking of a Raspberry Pi 4. I assume this isn't supported (yet).

Its x86 only currently. I know the owner does want to add arm support but its not being worked on.

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#38

Post by olliej »

the_biot wrote: post #25

This is an amazing piece of work, but it's clearly a labor of love: this isn't going to have any real-world use any time soon. Where operating systems are headed is more towards security (process isolation, bulletproof input etc), not lightweight GUIs on top of thin kernels like this. Are there any passion (or other) projects that explore this? I know about Qubes, but that's more like a heavy layer on top of a heavy…

Secure systems are lightweight kernels with thin UI layers, that’s part of how surface reduction is accomplished.

And yeah, it’s not going to have real world adoption soon. Neither did linux.

Every non-commercial OS starts out as a labour of love.

Good luck to them :)

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#39

Post by beardog »

walrus01 wrote: post #35
markstos wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spectrum OS, meant be a more usable upgrade from Qubes. Based on NixOS. Currently stuck on plumbing problems. https://spectrum-os.org/ Bheem OS, "a next generation secure operating system." Inspired some by Spectrum. So new they can't keep their blog online. Here's a snapshot of a recent blog post about the security features https://blog.openw3b.org/crosvm-for-os-and-app-virtualizatio...

the main problem I ran into with qubes is that having a xen hypervisor and an nvidia desktop graphics card in use (with proprietary nvidia drivers in use for proper performance) seem to be mutually exclusive. a xen dom0 needs to use the host system RAM in some way that causes kernel panics and crashes when the nvidia DKMS driver is loaded. I would wager that 99% of xen related development is intended, as it should be…

The reason isn't so much that xen doesn't support it but more so that graphics cards are not very well intended for isolation. Correct me if i'm wrong but i don't think you're supposed to compute 1 thing on a gpu and expect another thing to not get access. In recent time Qubes has made progress on making a GPU VM where you can compute on a secondary GPU, but it only works for amd currently.

I use nvidia every day with qubes, but just for display output. I sometimes see memory leaks where it will draw screen buffers from booting alternate OSes on another drive.

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#40

Post by dataflow »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #12

So first off: Very cool. Amazingly polished, and self-hosting! Especially since it looks to be an actually-independent project with POSIX as an optional compat layer. I feel like the features that are unique are mostly in 3 groups: 1. Features that shouldn't be unique to this system. Tabbed windows have occasionally happened on other systems, and probably should become more common, and there's no reason it shouldn't…

> Showing total size of subdirectories is expensive

To me the real obstacle isn't that it's expensive (I mean, you could ostensibly cache the size on disk for each directory, if not find some other clever algorithmic solution), but that the notion of "size of a directory" itself isn't all that meaningful in the presence of e.g. hardlinks.

Post reply on HN