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Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

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Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#211

Post by jws »

Santosh83 wrote: post #189

So 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.

If you write your operating system to use the paravirtual devices and run inside a hypervisor then you don’t need to worry about drivers for all the physical devices you might find.

By the time you have attracted enough users that those few percent of performance you are losing on the paravirtual drivers is an issue, the extra code for some performance critical native drivers will be a small part of your OS.

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#213

Post by gyulai »

Santosh83 wrote: post #189

So 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.

...or you can go the other route and make a very deliberate decision that there is one specific piece of hardware that you're going to support and not be sidetracked into developing drivers for a huge array of hardware.

For example, I bought a used Sony Xperia X that was several years out of date when Sailfish OS was released. I also bought a half-decade old Think Pad because it was one of the few machines that LibreBoot supports. I actually care way more about software than about having the latest hardware or the broadest array of hardware options to choose from.

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#214

Post by dsego »

foxfluff wrote: post #162
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?

On a related note, why a filesystem and not a database? I get the feeling that a filesystem ultimately is just a .. poor man's database. Except that it's quite crappy and there are no proper transactions, many things are impossible without TOCTOUs, many a bug (including security ones) have been due to race conditions around filesystem operations. I guess path->{metadata,data} with no transactions is a simple abstract…

Afaik, it's been tried and abandoned for some reason.

see WinFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#215

Post by n3storm »

phyrex wrote: post #200
joshspankit wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely have no idea why vector-based UIs have not become common already in at least one of the major OSs’

IIRC macOS’ GUI is using PDF (or postscript?) as it’s top layer

since Next ?

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#216

Post by JPLeRouzic »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #207
vendiddy wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there are any workarounds to this, such as some compatibility layer that allows a new OS to reuse Mac or Windows drivers. I have no experience in operating systems, so may be proposing a naive solution. Anyone here with more experience that could share some ideas?

We already see this to a certain extent, Linux has NDISWrapper to use some Windows drivers, but my understanding is that it isn't so straightforward for most other classes of driver because the way they work has a lot to do with the way the target OS kernel works and it's hard to map from one to the other.

Windows XP drivers used messages for communication between the kernel and the drivers, so it was quite straightforward.

A driver has to filter the messages it receives, process the one that were addressed to itself and pass on the other messages to the next driver.

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#217

Post by q-big »

torginus wrote: post #196
Sunspark wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a lot of work. One guy pulled it off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS

I remember one called SkyOS as well - it was really far along, probably killed by the lack of driver support. Unfortunately it's site seems to no longer exist. Here's the latest archive of it I could find: https://web.archive.org/web/20171014135312/http://www.skyos.... Also it's wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyOS

> I remember one called SkyOS as well - it was really far along, probably killed by the lack of driver support. Unfortunately it's site seems to no longer exist.

Here is the LinkedIn page of the main developer (Robert Szeleney) of SkyOS: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-szeleney-26902738/

In 2009, he founded Djinnworks: https://djinnworks.at/

You can find Robert Szeleney's email address on https://djinnworks.at/team

Considering the fact that according to the German wikipedia page (https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=SkyOS&oldid=21527...), the last version of SkyOS is from 2008, I don't believe that SkyOS was killed because of a lack of driver support, but rather because the main developer simply had to make money. But feel free to ask him directly, you now know how you can.

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#218

Post by sedan_baklazhan »

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.

Lately I was tryong to understand the exact reason "why". Why are modern browsers so ridiculously complicated? Rendering a (albeit confusing) content is a PDF-like kind of job (or am I wrong?) What is the exact complexity here (except for JS compiler, which is again just a compiler)?

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#219

Post by native_samples »

joshspankit wrote: post #185
asddubs wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’

They have, no? GNOME/KDE have supported SVG icons for years, the themes are usually vector based. I don't think there are necessarily many bitmaps in a default modern GNOME install.

For macOS the reason is simple and deliberate: it's much easier for artists to make beautiful icons as bitmaps. They can use Photoshop and not just vector editors. Given that screen resolutions increase at a somewhat slow and predictable pace it means they can just redraw icons at higher resolutions from time to time to keep up with their hardware changes. They like to change art styles anyway.

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#220

Post by diskzero »

zoom6628 wrote: post #99
thom wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the state of the art for file systems in the age of M2 drives that are bonkers fast? I dunno about everyone else, but knowing hierarchically where my disk space is going is a really common concern.

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?

This is exactly what Steve Jobs would tell me every week when he would look at the latest Finder build. Of course, we needed multiple pieces of infrastructure to get there; a journaled and indexed filesystem, kernel-level, file system modification notifications, metadata indexing systems, etc. All of the pieces did appear, but there are also those darn stubborn users who kept insisting on the ability to navigate a physical file system to an actual file.

Many of the features of OSX (which I rarely use, but worked tirelessly on) came as a result of Steve's dislike of having to know where files were and having to navigate to them. The Dock, Spotlight, Mission Control, Expose, even Time Machine all came out of Steve's hard-to-pin-down concept of what a modern user interface should be.

I suspect it may be possible to create a fully "Smart Folder" query driven Finder experience. Your sidebar could be populated entirely of saved queries. This might be a fun experiment!

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