Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch • Hacker News Board

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#151

Post by mrweasel » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 9:43 AM UTC

dmitriid wrote: post #137

sys_64738 wrote: post #4

It certainly looked super fast but no networking or web browser from what I saw.

These days it's easier to create an OS from scratch than a web browser.

That’s actually pretty scarry. Someone can write and entire graphical operating system, including filesystem and everything, but that same person have no hope of writing a browser to go with it.

There’s almost no commercial insentive to create a browser/rendering engine (Opera couldn’t make it work), and it almost to much work for an open source project to take on. As sad as it might be, Google won and Chromium will be the final browser, everything else is just customization. At least Microsoft had the courtesy of slowing down progress with Internet Explorer, allowing others to more easily catch up.

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#152

Post by glandium » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 9:45 AM UTC

dataflow wrote: post #86

dataflow wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you consider a "typical desktop", but on Windows, WinSxS has gigabytes worth of hardlinks. If you don't care about them that's another matter I guess.

Also note that the user will be confused when they delete the whole directory and observe 0 bytes get freed. (I guess a similar problem is also there even if you double count.) The point is, the problem itself is-ill defined. There's no solution to that other than scrapping or redefining the problem itself. And it's hard to define the problem precisely for a non-technical user.

> Also note that the user will be confused when they delete the whole directory and observe 0 bytes get freed.

Note that's already the case when the user removes files that are opened by some process.

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#153

Post by dataflow » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 9:47 AM UTC

glandium wrote: post #152

dataflow wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also note that the user will be confused when they delete the whole directory and observe 0 bytes get freed. (I guess a similar problem is also there even if you double count.) The point is, the problem itself is-ill defined. There's no solution to that other than scrapping or redefining the problem itself. And it's hard to define the problem precisely for a non-technical user.

> Also note that the user will be confused when they delete the whole directory and observe 0 bytes get freed. Note that's already the case when the user removes files that are opened by some process.

On Linux yeah. On Windows no.

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#154

Post by ghusbands » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 10:08 AM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #146

pjerem wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, it depends on how the application accessing the file is developed. If your program just read to copy in memory then closes the file, waiting for the next save to reopen it, the OS can’t know on which file you are working. And this, i think, must be a pretty common implementation.

If it closes the file, then it wouldn't be an open file?

Here, I think "open" means "being worked on in some app", rather than "has an active file handle".

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#155

Post by guerrilla » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 10:24 AM UTC

abnercoimbre wrote: post #79

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/

Does MacOS not highlight open files in Finder the way that it used to work back in MacOS 9?

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#156

Post by defanor » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 10:26 AM UTC

josephcsible wrote: post #76

erichocean wrote: post #75

Quoted post unavailable.

Why do you need one?

Not GP, but just was about to skim the sources and changed my mind upon seeing GitLab: its UI is sluggish to the point where FF occasionally asks whether it should stop JS execution, at least with larger projects.

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#157

Post by exikyut » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 10:28 AM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #134

busymom0 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SerenityOS is another one which was posted recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29270776 Video demo: https://vimeo.com/641406697

SerenityOS is great too. But it doesn’t run on real hardware yet I think?

Apparently it worked on specific hardware configurations a couple years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT-ME3PsKtc

In terms of general minimal-viable support, that's probably hit-and-miss (perhaps around where Linux distros were at in the early 90s - probably worked, except for everywhere it didn't), particularly with the increasing ossification and variability of BIOS/legacy emulation in current-era systems.

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#158

Post by Hnrobert42 » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 10:50 AM UTC

reedciccio wrote: post #113

zoom6628 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point but likewise one has to wonder why the need for folder hierarchies anyway. With bonkers fast disks and cpus the organising of files should be able to be dynamic and driven by some form of metadata and tags rather than static tree structures. The web doesn’t first require you to define a structure before search so why should a desktop?

Like beOS/Haiku does! Metadata and dynamic grouping of files + search is an amazing concept

Interesting. Sounds like Gmail’s labels vs everyone else’s folders. I wonder if it is a patent holding things back.

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#159

Post by hungryforcodes » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 10:57 AM UTC

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?

He says on GitHub that

"Essence will happily run on low-powered hardware. It can take less than 30MB of drive space, and boot with even less RAM"

which is pretty cool. ESP32s already have 8MB of RAM and access to SD cards. With 16MB could it run this? That would be amazing.

It's in a very interesting little spot between no OS (ala Arduino / Espruino), and an OS like Armbian, which is just huge really -- too big to fit in a microcontroller properly.

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#160

Post by Const-me » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 11:06 AM UTC

garaetjjte wrote: post #64

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you get into semantic arguments: If a directory contains 2 1GB files, does the user care that 99% of their blocks are shared, or that just an under-the-hood implementation detail, and the user wants to know that there are 2GB worth of files in there?

Really, there should be two file sizes: "how much space this will take if I copy it to other filesystem" and "how much space will be freed if I delete this"

Windows explorer does that.

They are labelled "Size" and "Size on disk", respectively.