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For those who, like me, wondered "what's HelenOS?" and got little idea from release notes: http://www.helenos.org/wiki/About
Tiny nitpick but the screenshot showing an application window rotated ~45 degrees is a little terrifying. Why would that be allowed?
For those who, like me, wondered "what's HelenOS?" and got little idea from release notes: http://www.helenos.org/wiki/About
Unfortunately, http://www.helenos.org/wiki/DiffFromUnix presents it as different enough to make porting software difficult. On the other hand, they say they've got GCC and Python, so it's doable.
If users need a plain Linux-compatible API, then presumably someone will build a library to handle that. No need to make the raw system call API exactly the same as Linux just for historical compatibility reasons, especially when the opportunity presents itself to clean things up a little.
(I could rant at considerable length about what I would change if I were creating a system-call interface from scratch.)
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Non-desk applications: vehicle, industrial, marine.
oooooh, stays steady with the boat pitching/rolling
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Why shouldn't it be allowed?
Every feature has a cost. Not just cost to develop, but cost to maintain. Every feature has a benefit- how useful is it, for how many users? If the cost outweighs the benefit, then it shouldn’t be allowed, for the sake of keeping the code maintainable and minimally fragile. Portrait orientation for displays isn’t unheard of, but it’s very very uncommon amongst even technical users. I’m sure a bunch of people reading…
A generic implementation that handles any orientation could just be the implementation with lower development and maintenance costs?
> surely it’s clear why not supporting arbitrary display orientations is at the very least an extremely rational choice from an engineering perspective.
That depends on the engineer. For some it might be easier to consider the special cases (landscape and portrait) first while others don't even want to be bothered with them until optimization time because a generic solution is the more straight forward approach.
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Every feature has a cost. Not just cost to develop, but cost to maintain. Every feature has a benefit- how useful is it, for how many users? If the cost outweighs the benefit, then it shouldn’t be allowed, for the sake of keeping the code maintainable and minimally fragile. Portrait orientation for displays isn’t unheard of, but it’s very very uncommon amongst even technical users. I’m sure a bunch of people reading…
I understand what you're getting at here, but it's also possible that this wasn't a directly pursued feature, and may have just naturally fallen out trivially from their display system's architecture & implementation as a by-product. If so, then the cost would be to exclude the capability explicitly.
Is there a 'distrowatch' for OSes other than Linux/BSD-based? I can't keep up with them all anymore.
osnews.com was once pretty good, but I haven't read it in a while and they did have some recent problems.
https://www.osnews.com/story/128924/what-happened-here/
To their credit, it looks like they're now trying to find ways to run the site profitably, so they can pay people to maintain the site part/full-time instead of relying on volunteer help.
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> Currently macOS only allows 90-degree rotation increments. Windows has supported landscape/portrait switching since forever, I think it was already there in windows XP almost two decades ago, if not it was in 7 for sure (and it's in 10 since I use it right now).
Windows has supported landscape/portrait switching since forever, I think it was already there in windows XP almost two decades ago, if not it was in 7 for sure (and it's in 10 since I use it right now). I wasn't trying to make a comparison to Windows, or start an OS war. I'm not sure why you even brought up Windows, since this discussion is about HelenOS. But for what it's worth, Macs have supported portrait mode si…