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Show HN: GodotOS – Fake operating system interface made in the Godot engine

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Re: Show HN: GodotOS – Fake operating system interface made in the Godot engine

#51

Post by Gormo »

This is actually a great proof of concept for using Godot as a cross-platform framework for desktop applications. The distribution package is incredibly simple -- just a single executable and a data file -- and performance is excellent.

This seems much superior to Flatpak and the like as a way to offer fully self-contained distro-agnostic binary packages, and vastly superior to Electron in the performance department. Maybe desktop applications built with game engines are the next big trend.

Re: Show HN: GodotOS – Fake operating system interface made in the Godot engine

#52

Post by eru »

Gormo wrote: post #51

This is actually a great proof of concept for using Godot as a cross-platform framework for desktop applications. The distribution package is incredibly simple -- just a single executable and a data file -- and performance is excellent. This seems much superior to Flatpak and the like as a way to offer fully self-contained distro-agnostic binary packages, and vastly superior to Electron in the performance department.…

The Firefox people have some nice write-ups about how they want to / wanted to use techniques from games to make Firefox's UI faster.

Re: Show HN: GodotOS – Fake operating system interface made in the Godot engine

#53

Post by 654wak654 »

netbioserror wrote: post #39

This just makes me yearn for a UI-centric minimal compilation mode for Godot. It's such an enticing target for GPU-rendered UI, and there are even some excellent libraries and plugins out there for making components that are useful in engineering or data analysis!

You can disable a lot of Godot's features when building the engine from source [1]. Not sure how much you can save while keeping most of the 2d/3d components, but it should be possible.

[1]: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/contributing/developm...

Re: Show HN: GodotOS – Fake operating system interface made in the Godot engine

#54

Post by mikepurvis »

actionfromafar wrote: post #38
larschdk wrote: post #35

Related: Grey Hack is a fake OS, Network, Internet in a multiplayer game where the objective is to hack (including each other). It simulates many basic functions quite well (you can steal files, place files on other computers, install software, run commands from a command line, including imitations of many tools). You can also write your own programs.

When will someone go all in and release a hack game with hundreds of emulated real little servers of various operating systems and vulnerabilities?

At a certain point on the realism continuum, just get rid of the gamey parts and deliver someone a set of VM images that they have to boot up and break into.

(Maybe that's actually what Hack the Box is, mentioned in the sibling— I hadn't heard of that and only looked briefly at the homepage for it.)

Re: Show HN: GodotOS – Fake operating system interface made in the Godot engine

#55

Post by popcar2 »

felideon wrote: post #33

This is great. Would you recommend Godot for prototyping UIs, in general, over HTML/JavaScript?

Short answer: Yes!

Long answer: I recommend Godot for rapid prototyping and creating desktop applications, but not necessarily for web app development. The biggest blocker is that Godot 4's export size is quite big compared to web standards, roughly 35MB uncompressed and 7.5MB compressed. The web version of GodotOS is 7.8MB, which may be too big for professional use.

Godot is fantastic for making quick prototypes though. The editor is very quick & intuitive once you understand the core concepts. It's also a fantastic tool for creating cross-platform desktop & mobile applications, some professional apps have been designed with it.[0]

[0]: https://alfredbaudisch.com/blog/gamedev/godot-engine/standal...

Re: Show HN: GodotOS – Fake operating system interface made in the Godot engine

#56

Post by mikepurvis »

internetter wrote: post #4
cl3misch wrote: post #3

From the screenshot: > GodotOS is a fake operating system Is it fake, though? Does the term "operating system" imply the level of hardware it's running on? Otherwise, even if it's running on top of another OS, it's still an OS.

I feel like operating system implies the existence of a kernel

Robot Operating System (ROS) is also an operating system, but it runs on top of computer operating systems like Linux and MacOS, and is focused on supplying the services, build toolchain, and communication standards/paradigms that are useful for implementing a robotics system, much as Linux (and its distros) are focused on providing that for a general computing environment.

In any case, it's clear that the project under discussion here isn't really any of these things is rather a system shell/GUI/launcher. But calling it an "OS" falls under the fun tradition many of us enjoyed in our youth of trying to recreate our own Windows in whatever was our programming platform of choice, and thinking that was what an OS was.

Re: Show HN: GodotOS – Fake operating system interface made in the Godot engine

#57

Post by jadtl »

Gormo wrote: post #51

This is actually a great proof of concept for using Godot as a cross-platform framework for desktop applications. The distribution package is incredibly simple -- just a single executable and a data file -- and performance is excellent. This seems much superior to Flatpak and the like as a way to offer fully self-contained distro-agnostic binary packages, and vastly superior to Electron in the performance department.…

I was trying to think of arguments against it, so I thought about the fact immediate mode GUIs might not always be suitable, before I stumbled upon this post: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47444189/what-are-the-pe... The only other downside I can think about is from a design standpoint, the application has to have the same design language across platforms, so it cannot have a native look for each. Any other cons?

Re: Show HN: GodotOS – Fake operating system interface made in the Godot engine

#58

Post by ladberg »

Gormo wrote: post #51

This is actually a great proof of concept for using Godot as a cross-platform framework for desktop applications. The distribution package is incredibly simple -- just a single executable and a data file -- and performance is excellent. This seems much superior to Flatpak and the like as a way to offer fully self-contained distro-agnostic binary packages, and vastly superior to Electron in the performance department.…

This would be sooo much worse from a UI point of view. All nice OS features (good text rendering, uniform text editing interface, accessibility, transparency) would all get chucked out the window.

I also don't think Godot is inherently more performant for any random UI than Electron is. It happens that most Godot apps are performant because they're made by the type of people who want to use videogame engines and thus care about performance. Electron can definitely have great performance when the developers care about performance (VSCode).

I say all this as someone who's worked on game engines before.

Re: Show HN: GodotOS – Fake operating system interface made in the Godot engine

#59

Post by lolinder »

ladberg wrote: post #58
Gormo wrote: post #51

This is actually a great proof of concept for using Godot as a cross-platform framework for desktop applications. The distribution package is incredibly simple -- just a single executable and a data file -- and performance is excellent. This seems much superior to Flatpak and the like as a way to offer fully self-contained distro-agnostic binary packages, and vastly superior to Electron in the performance department.…

This would be sooo much worse from a UI point of view. All nice OS features (good text rendering, uniform text editing interface, accessibility, transparency) would all get chucked out the window. I also don't think Godot is inherently more performant for any random UI than Electron is. It happens that most Godot apps are performant because they're made by the type of people who want to use videogame engines and thus…

Exactly. People hate on Electron because they have bad experiences with many Electron apps, but that's not because Electron is inherently terrible, it's because most developers choose Electron because it requires the lowest amount of effort. When you start with that as your single reason for choosing a tech stack, it's unsurprising that optimizing performance never happens.

VSCode works because they chose Electron for the advantages that web tech has when it comes to building a plugin ecosystem. They were then willing to put in the effort to make performance decent.

Re: Show HN: GodotOS – Fake operating system interface made in the Godot engine

#60

Post by popcar2 »

Gormo wrote: post #51

This is actually a great proof of concept for using Godot as a cross-platform framework for desktop applications. The distribution package is incredibly simple -- just a single executable and a data file -- and performance is excellent. This seems much superior to Flatpak and the like as a way to offer fully self-contained distro-agnostic binary packages, and vastly superior to Electron in the performance department.…

Completely agreed! I've been meaning to write a blog post on using Godot to professionally create cross-platform applications (and probably will soon). The short of it is that Godot is fantastic as a UI builder, and I think a lot of people are slowly realizing it. Many professional applications have been built with Godot[0] , and I also want to give a shoutout to Lorien[1] which is my favorite whiteboard application also made in Godot, and what partially inspired this whole project.

Godot isn't perfect of course, and there are some things that many other UI creating tools do better, but I think there's a lot of untapped potential here.

[0]: https://alfredbaudisch.com/blog/gamedev/godot-engine/standal...

[1]: https://github.com/mbrlabs/Lorien

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