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Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

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Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#101

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

aulin wrote: post #66
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #12

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…

> Programs updating file name when you rename from the file manager Doesn't inotify provide move events that allow that?

If every application uses inotify and correctly handles the events, I expect so. Which brings us back to "even if you can do it good luck getting buy in".

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#102

Post by HellsMaddy »

abnercoimbre wrote: post #79

If you want a fleshed out demo [0], we had the author present at our conference recently. Worth a watch. [0] https://media.handmade-seattle.com/essence/

I wasn't really that interested in this project from the website, but this video sold me. Super cool, wow!

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#104

Post by cryptonector »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #12

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…

Your examples of (2) and (3) have nothing to do with the desktop, really, or, rather, they are about things that one could see reflected in the desktop if only they were feasible at much lower layers.

"total size of subdirectories" is basically impossible as long as there are hardlinks. But hardlinks are useful, so. Even w/o hardlinks, if you have anything like ZFS snapshots and clones then you have multiple kinds of "total size" to show, like "total size" of all the files below vs. total space consumed by those files in this snapshot/clone. You could have hardlinks and all of them and then asynchronously update caches of sizes, but now you waste cycles on that and those cached sizes will often be wrong. You basically can't get there without making trade-offs that kinda suck. It's just better to not bother with this particular feature.

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#105

Post by Ostrogodsky »

nsonha wrote: post #23

What is a "desktop operating system"? Why do you need to reinvent operating system when all you create is a (rather traditional looking) desktop environment?

Why would you write a novel after Dostoevski? Why would you write a song after Chico Buarque? Why anybody would pay football after Pelé? And so on and so forth...

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#106

Post by robertoandred »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #12

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…

Tabbed windows are a built-in feature of native Mac apps.

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#108

Post by dang »

xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote: post #18

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

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

The Essence operating system at Handmade Seattle 2021 [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29386605 - Nov 2021 (39 comments)

Essence – An Operating System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28123530 - Aug 2021 (42 comments)

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