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

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#251

Post by asddubs » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 12:16 AM UTC

native_samples wrote: post #219

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’

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…

Well, they don't have it in such a way that things are arbitrarily scaleable (although things are slowly moving in that direction). If you look at the demo video you can see the entire GUI scale right up and down in real time

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#252

Post by joshspankit » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 1:00 AM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #250

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’

Low-resolution monitors and laptops remain widespread [0], and vector-based UI just doesn't look that good on those (either blurry or misaligned). I'm doubtful that HiDPI will become the mainstream standard anytime soon outside of smartphones and tablets (small screens). Cost increases quadratically with screen resolution as a function of production yield, so low-DPI hardware is likely to remain the cheaper option th…

> vector-based UI just doesn't look that good on those

Counterargument: Fonts are vectors, and with sub-pixel hinting they can look pretty good on low-DPI monitors

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#253

Post by nsonha » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 2:00 AM UTC

d_tr wrote: post #192

nsonha wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"labor of love To scratch an itch To explore an idea" that by no mean is a bad thing, it just means doing things for themselves, to express, to learn etc, typical of creative work. People do that all the time. However in OSS there is this thing when people feel they need to present their work as useful to others eventhough clearly what drives their work has nothing to do with other peoples' needs, it's just their itc…

I cannot be inside anyone's mind, but I know that one can have more than one equally strong motives when doing something.

they can, but don't have to, again there is nothing wrong with doing thing for yourself. Saying people always have others' interest in mind when doing side project does not reflect reality. Many of these projects are built with minimal feedback, so if they solve other people's problem it's by coincidence. I'm talking past the project in discussion of course, I don't know anything about it.

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#254

Post by d_tr » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 2:04 AM UTC

nsonha wrote: post #247

badsectoracula wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that is a problem because...? Remember that one of the original motivators behind "Open Source" is scratching your own itch.

> the original motivators behind "Open Source" is scratching your own itch. that's what I said, and you repeated it, as if it's some new insight or supports some argument. Is there not an issue in OSS where thing that should not be used in commercial context, are used in commercial context, they break, then people blame the adopters for expecting too much from OSS? Rarely the other side of the coin is addressed which…

You are saying a different thing now. Your previous comment touched a philosophical matter. Now it's about using, in a commercial product, OSS software people develop in their own time and that they might promote too much (I read this as "irresponsibly"). Both of these do not apply only to this kind of software and even if they did, what is the point of having this discussion (which could be an interesting one) here? If anything, we should encourage people that choose do this sort of work in this day and age.

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#255

Post by pmarreck » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 2:06 AM UTC

native_samples wrote: post #219

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’

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…

You can store anything painted on a computer in a vector format and just rasterize it at will, no?

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#256

Post by cardiffspaceman » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 2:34 AM UTC

joshspankit wrote: post #252

layer8 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low-resolution monitors and laptops remain widespread [0], and vector-based UI just doesn't look that good on those (either blurry or misaligned). I'm doubtful that HiDPI will become the mainstream standard anytime soon outside of smartphones and tablets (small screens). Cost increases quadratically with screen resolution as a function of production yield, so low-DPI hardware is likely to remain the cheaper option th…

> vector-based UI just doesn't look that good on those Counterargument: Fonts are vectors, and with sub-pixel hinting they can look pretty good on low-DPI monitors

> > vector-based UI just doesn't look that good on those

> Counterargument: Fonts are vectors, and with sub-pixel hinting they can look pretty good on low-DPI monitors

Ah, but I feel safe in saying, no one puts hints in nor uses hinting in the rendering of anything to do with folders and the like in a GUI.

The fact that autohinting exists doesn't mean that is easy to do.

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#257

Post by pmarreck » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 2:34 AM UTC

ninjanomnom wrote: post #245

cryptonector wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot more to it than that. For example, two links to a file in the same directory shouldn't count as doubling the space it consumes in that directory nor all its parents -- that's an easy case to consider, but there are others that are much harder.

Adding different kinds of measurements of size doesn't particularly increase the difficulty of tracking it here, just adds some more fields to the metadata and maybe some additional events. To take an example of size data types from another thread, let's imagine you want to track 2 kinds of size: size as read sequentially (A) and size gained if deleted (B). The first cares about links but the second does not. Every f…

This is exactly how I assumed modern operating systems would operate (macOS seems to operate this way because you can actually show size subtallies, but it actually polls and caches; Windows doesn’t even bother unless you get properties on a directory, which is lame; I think beOS may have actually done this?), and was disappointed when I realized it wasn’t… and still doesn’t for some reason? Why not? Couldn’t they just route all OS-level ways of writing to the storage medium through a system like this?

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#258

Post by LargoLasskhyfv » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 3:06 AM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #210

kevincox wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tabbed Finder windows are the most useless thing ever.. I'm glad I'm not the only one. I had to switch off of Nautilus because it kept trying to make me open things in new tabs instead of new windows. The thing is that I don't use the file manager much and 9/10 times I want to open directories is because I want to move files between them or less often visually compare which doesn't work well with tabs.

The state of file managers is really annoying. I'm currently using Caja, which is a Nautilus fork for MATE, so basically Nautilus frozen in time before they yanked the spatial bit and destroyed a bunch of the rest of the usability too, and it's better but still then hampered by just undoing the latest generations of damage done to it, not trying to do better - it was never great. To start with, I wish all of these wo…

Tried https://gitlab.com/antix-contribs/zzzfm ?

edit: This is the maintained fork of a fork of https://ignorantguru.github.io/spacefm/

edit because forgotten: which in turn is a fork of an early version of https://wiki.lxde.org/en/PCManFM and several 'mods' thereof.

Anyways. For me it's really usable, even without too much fiddling. Stays out of the way. Doesn't need much RAM and can handle anything I throw at it, which may not be 'Data-Hoarder' territory exactly, but I do have large Tsundoku-stacks which require work to shrink them, and the usual assortment of movies and music, pictures, sources, and so on.

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#259

Post by skyde » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 3:22 AM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #250

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’

Low-resolution monitors and laptops remain widespread [0], and vector-based UI just doesn't look that good on those (either blurry or misaligned). I'm doubtful that HiDPI will become the mainstream standard anytime soon outside of smartphones and tablets (small screens). Cost increases quadratically with screen resolution as a function of production yield, so low-DPI hardware is likely to remain the cheaper option th…

not sure about blurry and miss aligned! Did you check out Antigrain geometry library? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Grain_Geometry

It flawlessly render vector graphics (SVG) with sub pixels resolution

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#260

Post by nitrogen » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 3:26 AM UTC

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’

Weren't both X11 and Windows originally vector-based (as in drawn using lines, rects, and fills) UIs, but everyone moved to pixmaps because the X11 protocol didn't support anything remotely SVG-like and client-side drawing was faster?