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Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

nakst.gitlab.io

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Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#71

Post by ReactiveJelly »

juice_bus wrote: post #3

Are we in an (hobby) OS renaissance? I feel like more and more of these amazing projects are popping up.

Maybe! It's not like the compilers, documentation, and emulators needed to launch a hobby OS are getting any harder or more expensive!

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#72

Post by 7thaccount »

TheFreim wrote: post #22
jhgb wrote: post #16

> 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).

I have multiple RPi devices but I don't really think of it when I heard "low-powered hardware", I think of a low end laptop from ~2010.

But wouldn't this also run on a laptop that is much older? My pentium 4 computer from when I was not much older than my daughter had much better specs than the minimum they need here. I'm sure there are some other limitations though.

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#73

Post by toast0 »

NavinF wrote: post #49
dataflow wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Showing total size of subdirectories is expensive To me the real obstacle isn't that it's expensive (I mean, you could ostensibly cache the size on disk for each directory, if not find some other clever algorithmic solution), but that the notion of "size of a directory" itself isn't all that meaningful in the presence of e.g. hardlinks.

Roughly 0% of a typical desktop’s disk space is used by hardlinked files. You can safely double count them. That’s exactly what every disk space analyzer does! If you really wanna avoid double counting, just divide the size of every file by st_nlink. Of course you’d have to update the cached sizes of every directory that has a link to that inode so you’d need to cache the mapping from inodes to paths too. Another sol…

> Roughly 0% of a typical desktop’s disk space is used by hardlinked files. You can safely double count them. That’s exactly what every disk space analyzer does!

While that may be a reasonable strategy, it's not what every disk space analyzer does.

I've got a backup setup that uses hardlinks to provide a wide variety of restore points without using a lot of space. du doesn't double count:

   $ du -hs daily.0
   436G    daily.0

   $ du -hs daily.1
   436G    daily.1

   $ du -hs daily.0 daily.1
   436G    daily.0
   12M    daily.1

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#74

Post by CyberRabbi »

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…

The universal tabbing is a genius feature.

Re: Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch

#77

Post by phendrenad2 »

gk1256 wrote: post #24

I like the UI, but I'm disappointed to find that the author is using orthodox C++ instead Modern C++

For the kernel, or for the user-mode applications? C++ features aren't very useful for kernels. Presumably the author is more familiar with C and "C with classes" C++ and someone can rewrite the user-mode apps in modern C++ later.
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