121–130 of 299 posts
Are we in an (hobby) OS renaissance? I feel like more and more of these amazing projects are popping up.
QNX, V2OS [1] (written in x86 assembly), SkyOS to name a few. I mention QNX because I remember running it from a floppy in end of 90s. Unix system with GUI, from one 1"44 floppy.
In the 00s, the website OSnews often covered all kind of alternative OSes (how I came across SkyOS).
Which recent ones are you aware of?
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…
Tabbed windows are a built-in feature of native Mac apps.
So it is nice that it makes use of C++ and there are some frameworks already like the GUI stack, however this is missing from the website.
If you want a fleshed out demo [0], we had the author present at our conference recently. Worth a watch. [0] https://media.handmade-seattle.com/essence/
Stunning attention to detail - font choice on install, dynamic file renaming, open file highlighting, tabbed windows with apps inside. These felt so intuitive to me as I watched. Vector based UI - excellent choice!
Watching the demo brought back memories of OS/2 and BeOS in terms of aesthetics and usability. The theme designer blew me away - it looked like Sketch or Adobe XD in terms of UI prototyping. If this offers a way to draw your UI with vector based tools and have it "attached" to the OS's API then that's really exciting.
Further, if this could be extended to a VB style application where one can code in actions, events etc in a user accessible way [1] then I think it would be a killer app for this OS where a user/developer could shape the entire OS to fit the needs of the design.
I'm thinking here of a single use OS on a USB stick - for example, a writer's OS where the whole OS/Apps just provide a rich environment for wordsmiths to work in creative isolation. Like the "Zen" mode of many editors, but taken to the next level. Glorious looking dictionaries, pinboards for notes and research etc etc. Design the UI, apps and utilities and compile it all into a single, bootable OS would be wonderful. That would be very satisfying to me the way my mind is wired.
[1] To be clear, a language which is approachable by beginners, e.g. BASIC like or some high level scripting language. Also pluggable languages would be very cool for advanced workers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 :)
> Every non-commercial OS starts out as a labour of love. Tell that to Andrew Tanenbaum
This is insane, I can't imagine how much work went into it. I had a similar idea as a kid, I was pissed at all the bloat consuming my cpu and ram on windows so I wanted to build my own os that would run a single app taking advantage of 100% of the hardware. I learned some assembly and managed to create a bootable floppy disk, then quickly gave up, realizing how much work a functioning os would take...
It's a lot of work. One guy pulled it off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29270776
Video demo:
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its x86 only currently. I know the owner does want to add arm support but its not being worked on.
Curious, is porting complex C++ projects to arm64 just a matter of updating build/CI systems or does it actually involve changing core code and adding branches if (x64) {} ... if (arm64) {}.
x86 and ARM don't same the same memory consistency model, so while managed languages do somehow protect their users from the differences, languages like C++ do expose it by default (unless you make use of the C++11 memory model APIs[0]).
So it depends how clever the lock-free kernel datastructure were written and other memory access assumptions.
[0] - https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/memory_model
Are we in an (hobby) OS renaissance? I feel like more and more of these amazing projects are popping up.
Its a sign of all times. QNX, V2OS [1] (written in x86 assembly), SkyOS to name a few. I mention QNX because I remember running it from a floppy in end of 90s. Unix system with GUI, from one 1"44 floppy. In the 00s, the website OSnews often covered all kind of alternative OSes (how I came across SkyOS). Which recent ones are you aware of? [1] https://github.com/joostfaassen/v2os
Nowadays it is chosen OS used by NVidia for their autonomous vehicles (Linux is for development mostly).
Gives me very strong BeOS vibes.