Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I'm forking Ladybird and stepping down as SerenityOS BDFL

awesomekling.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 280 posts

Re: I'm forking Ladybird and stepping down as SerenityOS BDFL

#111

Post by [deleted] »

dormento wrote: post #105
awesomekling wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you so much for sponsoring me! :) As I wrote in the announcement, I've already been working primarily on Ladybird for ~2 years already, so you have indeed been sponsoring Ladybird development by sponsoring me. SerenityOS doesn't have a GitHub Sponsors itself, but it does use Polar to allow anyone to directly sponsor work on specific issues. See https://polar.sh/SerenityOS And don't worry, there won't be some VC…

> And don't worry, there won't be some VC investment or big company buyout. I fell for that trick 27 times already, you can't fool me! j/k Thanks for the ride, wish you the best of luck.

[deleted]

Re: I'm forking Ladybird and stepping down as SerenityOS BDFL

#112

Post by jerf »

bambax wrote: post #55
The_Colonel wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree (apart from the popular hate on Firefox). Ladybird is promising and has a much bigger chance to make an impact than SerenityOS. But it's a bit disappointing to see that it's still pretty much a one-man project. Especially to have a chance to get close to the performance of Chrome and Firefox, it will need a large investment. The amount of engineering resources poured into just making JavaScript fast is mind-n…

On recent hardware, how much "performance" do we really need? Wouldn't almost any compliant browser be basically good enough?

There's several decades-old sayings to the effect of what Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away, or similar observations about the software side of computing spending all the hardware improvements and more.

To this general principle you can add browsers and websites; what the browser giveth, the websites taketh away. You may think browsers are slow... they really aren't! There's a staggering, even arguably insane, amount of optimization in there. But then we write websites that are barely adequate, and load them up with ad scripts that aren't even barely adequate, and blame the browsers for being slow.

Write yourself an old-school 1998-style static website without a big pile of fancy features, give yourself solid .css and .js caching and use it judiciously, and the browsers can blast content to the screen blazingly fast, for all the work it is doing.

If you even could feed a 2024 web site to a 1998 browser, you'd probably be able to eat a meal while it was trying to render facebook.

Re: I'm forking Ladybird and stepping down as SerenityOS BDFL

#113

Post by robertlagrant »

ZiiS wrote: post #78
rascul wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would be nice to see a browser option that is not 20+ years old. Chrome is less than 20 years old.

KHTML+KJS released in 1998, via WebKit from 2001, in 2008 it gained the Chrome name, but the code has more than 20 years of legacy.

> KHTML+KJS released in 1998, via WebKit from 2001, in 2008 it gained the Chrome name, but the code has more than 20 years of legacy.

Why do you want the oldest code to be less than 20 years old? Why is that "nice"?

Re: I'm forking Ladybird and stepping down as SerenityOS BDFL

#114

Post by Apocryphon »

hurutparittya wrote: post #41

I might sound jaded, but I'd be more excited for a Chromium fork that focuses on hackability instead of a brand new browser that'll take somewhere between years to ∞ to be even remotely useful. I get why that'd be less fun to work on though.

Why not directly fork WebKit, as the Orion browser did?

Re: I'm forking Ladybird and stepping down as SerenityOS BDFL

#115

Post by lukan »

M95D wrote: post #109
HeckFeck wrote: post #25

I fully respect these reasons, they are logical and well said. But hopefully interest in SerenityOS doesn't taper off due to this. Kling was great at garnering interest with his YouTube videos where he'd go deep into bug fixing and feature development. Certainly, the browser has the most potential and even immediate necessity for the sake of the open Web, but I would still like to daily drive SerenityOS some day. Its…

Linux (kernel I mean) is good enough. There were some scheduling problems with audio, but it's mostly resolved. The problem is GNU style. We need another GUI and that doesn't mean just replacing X with/or Wayland protocol. It means replacing GTK and QT too.

ChromeOS seems very polished under the hood.

It is fast and open source. But very tightly integrated into google and so I doubt, this will ever become a solid base for a new linux desktop.

Re: I'm forking Ladybird and stepping down as SerenityOS BDFL

#116

Post by pjmlp »

frankjr wrote: post #81

What's the plan for Jakt, the programming language? Does it fall under the SerenityOS umbrella? Will LadyBird continue to use C++? The blog post doesn't mention it. https://github.com/SerenityOS/jakt

Given that the main author is looking into another language, maybe not much left anyway.

https://www.sophiajt.com/search-for-easier-safe-systems-prog...

Re: I'm forking Ladybird and stepping down as SerenityOS BDFL

#117

Post by packetlost »

M95D wrote: post #109
HeckFeck wrote: post #25

I fully respect these reasons, they are logical and well said. But hopefully interest in SerenityOS doesn't taper off due to this. Kling was great at garnering interest with his YouTube videos where he'd go deep into bug fixing and feature development. Certainly, the browser has the most potential and even immediate necessity for the sake of the open Web, but I would still like to daily drive SerenityOS some day. Its…

Linux (kernel I mean) is good enough. There were some scheduling problems with audio, but it's mostly resolved. The problem is GNU style. We need another GUI and that doesn't mean just replacing X with/or Wayland protocol. It means replacing GTK and QT too.

Isn't that basically ElementaryOS? Or is that not a group up rewrite?

Re: I'm forking Ladybird and stepping down as SerenityOS BDFL

#118

Post by lukan »

nottorp wrote: post #59
awesomekling wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ladybird does not have investors, only sponsors/donors. We have received some really generous donations in the past, for example $100,000 from Shopify in 2023 which allowed me to hire a few of our contributors to work full time on the project. :) Sponsors have no direct influence over the project, but I obviously feel a strong moral obligation to put 100% of the funds towards improving Ladybird and nothing else.

100k is not "well funded by large investors" anyway :)

Sadly it is, when we are talking about independent open source projects.

Re: I'm forking Ladybird and stepping down as SerenityOS BDFL

#119

Post by wizzwizz4 »

rafram wrote: post #93
ZiiS wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KHTML+KJS released in 1998, via WebKit from 2001, in 2008 it gained the Chrome name, but the code has more than 20 years of legacy.

There’s very little WebKit / KHTML code left in Chrome.

There's very little NT 3.1 code left in Windows, but it's still clear how old that project is.

Re: I'm forking Ladybird and stepping down as SerenityOS BDFL

#120

Post by HeckFeck »

M95D wrote: post #109
HeckFeck wrote: post #25

I fully respect these reasons, they are logical and well said. But hopefully interest in SerenityOS doesn't taper off due to this. Kling was great at garnering interest with his YouTube videos where he'd go deep into bug fixing and feature development. Certainly, the browser has the most potential and even immediate necessity for the sake of the open Web, but I would still like to daily drive SerenityOS some day. Its…

Linux (kernel I mean) is good enough. There were some scheduling problems with audio, but it's mostly resolved. The problem is GNU style. We need another GUI and that doesn't mean just replacing X with/or Wayland protocol. It means replacing GTK and QT too.

The penguin kernel is indeed very nifty and boots nearly everywhere. Most importantly it is replete with battle-tested drivers.

Maybe the bold solution would be to port the Serenity userland + UI stack across to Linux and be very staunch about what gets into it. Essentially grafting the Linux kernel in place of the Serenity one, and using its UI Kit and WindowServer instead of GTK/QT/X/Wayland.

Maybe it might even be possible to preserve the logic and non-UI libraries of many applications, even if the UI required a complete rewrite.

A bit fantastical but just putting it out there.

Post reply on HN