Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

So 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 work on other systems. I hope this inspires other people to copy;)

2. Features that only work if you have really tight integration or different primitives than most OSs are using. Programs updating file name when you rename from the file manager, or the file manager showing when files are open... might be possible to graft on to other systems, but it'd be a right pain. Even systems like MacOS are going to struggle - the whole OS is under one company that could do cross-functional stuff like that, but any time it touches applications you need external developers to support it and that may or may not work out.

3. Features that are possible, but nobody else does it because it's impractical - possibly only impractical from their starting points, though. Showing total size of subdirectories is expensive on ex. Linux because you have to walk every file recursively. I don't know if they're just eating the cost because they haven't hit a case where it matters, or if their system actually makes it cheap (I could easily imagine a filesystem that moved the calculation cost up front).

I watched the video which said no networking. Maybe the video is old.

> Essence will happily run on low-powered hardware

The thing is, when I see a mention of "low-powered hardware", I'm instantly thinking of a Raspberry Pi 4. I assume this isn't supported (yet).

Previous discussion (5 months ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28123530

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.