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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

#151

Post by bigstrat2003 »

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…

Except VSCode most certainly does not have great performance. I can open the same set of files in VSCode and Sublime, and Sublime will use a few hundred MB of memory while VSCode uses well over 1 GB. That's not acceptable.

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

#152

Post by chuckadams »

trealira wrote: post #127
bluetomcat wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An application that spawns processes/apps/modules, controls them and lets them communicate back to the application for some service is also, in a loose sense, an operating system.

That seems a bit too loose. Doesn't that apply to IDEs that implement the language server protocol, since they spawn language servers and communicate with them? And servers like Apache that spawn child processes to handle requests?

Apache supervises tasks in the form of threads and subprocesses, including managing memory in the form of pools, so yes, it's doing some of what an OS would do. It isn't, on the other hand, providing abstractions to hardware, and that's what I think of when I hear "OS". It's not really a cut-and-dried thing though: modern web browsers are like 90% of the way to being full-blown OS's, even down to abstracting hardware in the case of things like WebGPU, but they still rely on a host OS to bridge the connection and do the actual bit-banging required to make it work.

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

#153

Post by rubymamis »

jshreder wrote: post #148
rubymamis wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I own a 2017 MacBook Air, and I don't see why a block editor like Notion should be so slow on my computer. This is why I'm building my own block editor in Qt C++ and QML[1]. [1] https://www.get-plume.com/

Just wanted to compliment your landing page and the intro gif. Great showcase of the app, if I wasn't hooked on LogSeq I'd give it a try!

Thanks a lot, I'm very happy to hear! Essentially, all notes are just markdown/plaintext, so it should be easy to move your data to/from LogSeq. I'm saying essentially tho cause, although the underlying data is plaintext, they are stored inside a local database rather than an arbitrary folder. But soon I'll change that.

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

#154

Post by KomoD »

alemanek wrote: post #139
fkyoureadthedoc wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

brb, just switching my 100k employee company from Teams to IRC, should be quick and easy, everyone is going to love it.

If they are on MacOS they may make you their king. I still have PTSD from the last job that I had to use Teams on a Mac.

Teams is awful on all platforms, I don't ever want to touch it again

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

#155

Post by whstl »

alemanek wrote: post #139
fkyoureadthedoc wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

brb, just switching my 100k employee company from Teams to IRC, should be quick and easy, everyone is going to love it.

If they are on MacOS they may make you their king. I still have PTSD from the last job that I had to use Teams on a Mac.

They might indeed. There are some very nice native IRC clients for macOS that are fast and good...

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

#156

Post by homarp »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #129
whstl wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that Electron is superior to something like a Godot UI in absolutely everything else. Sure Godot can be ok for trivial apps, but extracting performance out of Electron is also not that difficult for trivial apps in the first place.

> The problem is that Electron is superior to something like a Godot UI in absolutely everything else. Why? What capabilities does Electron provide that Godot doesn’t and can’t? I’m genuinely asking. I don’t know.

Electron allows you can do webdev stuff, so you don't need custom knowledge of anything special. That's the 'superiority'.

Doing UI in Godot means either their pythonish custom language or C# (and via GDExtension technology, C and C++ ).

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

#157

Post by whstl »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #129
whstl wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that Electron is superior to something like a Godot UI in absolutely everything else. Sure Godot can be ok for trivial apps, but extracting performance out of Electron is also not that difficult for trivial apps in the first place.

> The problem is that Electron is superior to something like a Godot UI in absolutely everything else. Why? What capabilities does Electron provide that Godot doesn’t and can’t? I’m genuinely asking. I don’t know.

Electron has literally thousands and thousands of very, very complex UI/UX features offered by the OS, plus thousands and thousands of very, very complex UI/UX features offered by a browser engine.

Godot has barely nothing compared to that, as it's not an UI toolkit and never tried to be.

Even basic things like "rendering text correctly in multiple languages, with emojis, while making it selectable with the mouse or with the keyboard" are super hard to get right, but it's a problem already solved by your OS, in a way that is not only better optimized and has less unseen bugs than a hypothetical bespoke implementation: it also looks and feels more familiar. Then there's the whole accessibility part, which has different native APIs depending on the OS.

Some other people have written detailed answers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38953558

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38954455

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38954087

EDIT: You asked "doesn't and can't". Here's something: there is no can't if you have a turing complete language. But you need a large team to re-do it from scratch, as you're throwing away 40 years of work.

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

#158

Post by bufio »

dekerta wrote: post #120
bufio wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never encountered an Electron app that can even display the results of keystrokes in a timely manner, and that includes vscode. All Electron apps waste system resources to an obscene degree. Also, Electron apps have already thrown away OS conventions to the point that user interface consistency has become a thing of the past. I don't believe that either choice is ideal, but if Godot were ubiquitous instead of…

Are you running a 15 year old netbook or something? I've never noticed any input lag in VSCode or Slack (or any other Electron apps I can think of)

You're probably used to high latency.

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

#159

Post by whstl »

corethree wrote: post #66
ladberg wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No it's better for an os UI. A web page UI is better with electron where you click on a link an open a page. But floating windows with resizeable and highly dynamic UIs Godot is likely easier, better and much more well suited. HTML was never intended for dynamic interfaces. Whenever you diverge beyond what it does best which is hypertext, things become more and more hacky and awkward. If you wanted to design an os UI…

> Developers with nothing better to do keep coming up with new abstractions trying to build for a moving target

Bullshit. React is almost 11 years old, the only other two really popular competitors are 10 and 13 and use the same paradigm.

Everything else in this area is very experimental and tentative, as it should be, but it is mostly celebrated by people who, surprise, complain that "the web is too complex".

Even "new hotness" like Tailwind is based off quite old Atomic CSS ideas that started in the late 2000s and early 2010s at Yahoo.

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

#160

Post by corethree »

arshxyz wrote: post #136
corethree wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's better for an os UI. A web page UI is better with electron where you click on a link an open a page. But floating windows with resizeable and highly dynamic UIs Godot is likely easier, better and much more well suited. HTML was never intended for dynamic interfaces. Whenever you diverge beyond what it does best which is hypertext, things become more and more hacky and awkward. If you wanted to design an os UI…

> HTML to awkward so you have to switch to webgl which is too low level or you might switch to svg HTML is replaceable by WebGL which is replaceable by SVG? > JavaScript that compiles down into typescript JS compiles down to TS? I am not sure if anything in this comment indicates you have any experience with developing for the web but that is not my primary issue with this comment. My gripe is claiming that things ar…

>JS compiles down to TS?

It's called a typo.

>I am not sure if anything in this comment indicates you have any experience with developing for the web but that is not my primary issue with this comment. My gripe is claiming that things are "awkward" or can't be done without even looking around. None of the examples below use WebGL

I think you're smart enough to recognize it's a typo. The primary issue with your comment is hiliteing issues as if it weren't typos but actual lapses in experience. It's like saying someone misspelled a word and claiming they therefore have no experience with the English language. If someone did that, the intent is 100% malice, not a misunderstanding. Don't be malicious. Don't debate and use malice to prove a point. What you should do is Make a point and change your stance based off of evidence.

Also I never said it can't be done. I said it's awkward. It certainly can be done.

WebGL is low level. Same with WebGPU, it means you have to use shaders. Godot has a library for UI. Which makes it less awkward. I'm saying it's JUST as awkward to build these things with webGL then with other web front end technologies.

>Here's a WinXP UI clone that runs in your browser with floating, resizable windows. - https://winxp.vercel.app/ >Here's one that mocks macOS - https://macos-web.app/

What do these examples prove? That it can be done? Did I say it can't be done? Again I didn't. It's obvious these examples exist, everyones seen them. Heck you can probably do the whole thing with CSS and no JS. The gist of my comment is that it's awkward to do, not that it can't be done. You can construct a house out of toothpicks and glue. I'm sure it CAN be done. But bricks are the less awkward tool.

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