You definitely need to watch the video of the OS in action. Ten minutes well spent.
Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch
181–190 of 299 posts
Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch
#182What is a "desktop operating system"? Why do you need to reinvent operating system when all you create is a (rather traditional looking) desktop environment?
Microsoft has been reinventing their GUI constantly starting at the API level. Maybe they 'll get it right after a few more tens of billions of dollars. Meanwhile when I open the file manager in Windows 11 with Microsoft's own dark theme, it flashes white before it settles. I guess it is hard to get it right when you are swimming in an ocean full of your own excrement, and even harder when you have other priorities, like inventing more garbage protocols on top of your "Chromium: Reskinned" browser to make it harder for me to select a different default web browser.
Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch
#183If 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/
This video is already included in the web page under the “Watch a demonstration of the system running on real hardware. Recorded in October 2021.” paragraph.
Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch
#184If 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/
I just watched the video and noticed the whole Vector based UI. I know there are Vector based icons and graphics set in other OS or Desktop Environment, but is this the first time the whole UI being Vector based? Lots of interesting thoughts and experiment in modern day Vector UI capabilities.
Technically GUIs are, or used to be anyway, be drawn with drawing commands like "DrawRect, DrawLine, DrawRoundedBox", etc, which are basically vectors encoded in code and could be easily scaled. Windows has/had the metafile image file format[0] that basically encodes these calls into a stream for later reuse (AFAIK Office clip art used to be metafiles). Since these are vectors they can be arbitrarily scaled. The earlier versions of Windows even had to work not only on different pixel densities (that produced more or less the same visual screen space) but also on different pixel aspect ratios, like CGA's 640x200 mode.
However once GUIs started relying on using bitmaps for drawing parts of the theme things got a bit less vector-y. But that happened later.
[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/windows_protocols...
Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch
#185So 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…
I think the vector based UI should be on the list somewhere. Really smart solution to the HiDPI problem that gives you easy arbitrary scaling without any awkwardness
I genuinely have no idea why vector-based UIs have not become common already in at least one of the major OSs’
Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch
#186Here’s to all the people who make their own operating systems. It’s great to see what a unified vision and some offbeat thinking can produce.
it's neat. there's like a whole indie os dev scene these days. kinda like when people used write os gui shell fanfiction, now they're writing their own novels with kernels from scratch and everything.
AFAIK this was a thing for a long time and not something recent. IIRC Bochs for example was written by someone making their own OS and wanting a way to debug it.
Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The SerenityOS people are implementing their own browser. It's nowhere near usable for the modern web yet, but it's slowly chugging along, inching closer. Of course the difference between building an OS and a browser is that for an OS, you just have to build something that is usable, how you get there and what that looks like is up to you, and you can really get creative with it and break norms. For a browser engine,…
please check the video I mentioned in the above post; Alan Kay addresses exactly this point ...in 1997
Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch
#188Very cool. Nice that it runs without all the processes... But that will come at a certain point haha. I like that they implemented composing tabs between different applications. This is the way I try to organize work/projecta/projectb/personal use, but it never works with current osses. Spaces in macOS is actually kind of useless, because certain applications have windows across screens (finder, chrome). Tabbed Finde…
> Tabbed Finder windows are the most useless thing ever. Hard disagree. I use them all the time.
I don't use finder tabs much. I just use them to create a new tab, when I need to copy something inside a directory without losing my current "state".
I tend to use finder tabs very differently than the browser tabs where I can have many different websites, but later I tend to forget why I have those there.
I'm glad that MacOS can restore everything pretty well after a logout/login. A major focus of OS should be on managing these "work state" through new UI paradigms/tools. edit: typos
Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch
#189So many interesting/fascinating concepts and ideas that will remain relegated to niche communities because of basically one problem: lack of drivers. This is the problem that must be solved if we ever want to move away from the dominance of a few OSes "too big to fail" and their million compromises to a thriving field where competent programmers can create new OSes as easily as now they can create new apps.
Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch
#190This is part of the handmade software movement. An effort to focus down on elegant software development using primitives rather than generic libraries and testing the status quo. Exciting to see this project move along!