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Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

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Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#71

Post by wolrah »

mikepurvis wrote: post #50
qwerty456127 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security I believe multi-user systems are actually an ancient, outdated rather than a "modern" concept. It made sense when computers were huge, expensive and many users shared one even at work, let alone at home. Nowadays computers are almost never shared. Even when people used to have just one home PC per family (during pre-Win7 days) they mo…

Modern multi-user paradigms also have very weird ideas of what’s shared. Like, installing or updating software is the same permission tier as accessing another user’s documents, wtf?

> Like, installing or updating software is the same permission tier as accessing another user’s documents, wtf?

To some extent, yes. If I can install software of my own choosing on basically any normal desktop OS that will appear to other users of the system as "LibreOffice", "Firefox", etc. then I more or less have access to all their data.

MacOS is starting to sandbox applications but not by a lot, and of course Windows Store sandboxed apps are more or less dead in the water.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#72

Post by qwerty456127 »

squarefoot wrote: post #66
qwerty456127 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can actually make sense - why not make Electron a shared part of the OS instead of so many apps bundling it. As I understand Apple once built its entire GUI system around a flavour of PostScript which was designed for documents typesetting. Now the world just is doing a similar thing with HTML.

> why not make Electron a shared part of the OS instead of so many apps bundling it. Because it's a wrong approach to a problem that was solved decades ago by much smaller and faster system libraries for UI development.

Apparently these libraries and the languages they are designed to be used with failed to offer sufficiently easy way to implement the UX people want.

I myself strongly prefer classic desktop GUIs adhering to the 90s Microsoft and Apple design guidelines, also well-designed (rather than chaotically evolved like JavaScript) programming languages too yet the objective reality seems like that's not what the demand is for - real-life companies and people prefer fast-entry non-proprietary languages like JavaScript and virtually-unlimited expression like what CSS gives. The only libraries I know can technically be good alternatives to Electron are Qt Quick, WPF (and its spinoffs) and JavaFX but they all have downsides which limit their adoption.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#73

Post by stkdump »

ajb wrote: post #7

It was ahead of its time in UX, but rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security, and there was no system of shared libraries - to share code between applications, it was usual to put the shared code in a kernel module and call the kernel. Even the standard C library worked this way. Amusingly, when you invoked the system console -which was at a lower level than the gui system, ef…

Nowadays there is also more and more nothing shared besides the kernel. Look at technologies like electron, docker, flatpak, etc.

Similar to multiuser: Security is important, but as applications get more and more powerful it is not about what individual users can and can't do, but what each application can and can't do.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#74

Post by com2kid »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #65
com2kid wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This can actually make sense - why not make Electron a shared part of the OS instead of so many apps bundling it. Microsoft did this ages ago, they lost a big anti-trust trial over it. Aside from that, people ship electron because it works the same across different OSs, if you just want to target one OS, you are better off using that OSs native dev toolkit. Although good luck finding anyone who knows how to write n…

> people ship electron because it works the same across different OSs Why does Microsoft build the very VisualStudio installer with Electron then? To me it seems companies ship electron because it's easy to hire a JavaScript developer.

> Why does Microsoft build the very VisualStudio installer with Electron then?

> To me it seems companies ship electron because it's easy to hire a JavaScript developer.

When I worked at Microsoft, one team I was on, very ironically, had a really hard time finding Windows developers.

We actually resorted to drawing straws to see who on the team would have to learn native Windows development!

IMHO a large part of the problem is that native Windows development is a career dead end, unless you work at Microsoft, there are relatively few well paying jobs for what is now a niche skillset.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#75

Post by Elyra »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #47
ajb wrote: post #7

It was ahead of its time in UX, but rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security, and there was no system of shared libraries - to share code between applications, it was usual to put the shared code in a kernel module and call the kernel. Even the standard C library worked this way. Amusingly, when you invoked the system console -which was at a lower level than the gui system, ef…

> rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security I believe multi-user systems are actually an ancient, outdated rather than a "modern" concept. It made sense when computers were huge, expensive and many users shared one even at work, let alone at home. Nowadays computers are almost never shared. Even when people used to have just one home PC per family (during pre-Win7 days) they mo…

> Nowadays computers are almost never shared.

I find it ironic that Google TV still does not have this feature, it is the one "computer" that people probably still share regularly.

Sure you can login to multiple accounts and have different "profiles", but that just changes home screen recommendations, all the apps and their sessions are shared. So since I share it with a few roommates, we're constantly having to logout and in to our accounts in different apps to access our watch histories, our plex servers, etc.

On the other hand, my android phone does multiple accounts perfectly, why can't it work the same way on the TV?

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#76

Post by lelanthran »

com2kid wrote: post #61
qwerty456127 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can actually make sense - why not make Electron a shared part of the OS instead of so many apps bundling it. As I understand Apple once built its entire GUI system around a flavour of PostScript which was designed for documents typesetting. Now the world just is doing a similar thing with HTML.

> This can actually make sense - why not make Electron a shared part of the OS instead of so many apps bundling it. Microsoft did this ages ago, they lost a big anti-trust trial over it. Aside from that, people ship electron because it works the same across different OSs, if you just want to target one OS, you are better off using that OSs native dev toolkit. Although good luck finding anyone who knows how to write n…

> Although good luck finding anyone who knows how to write native apps for desktops anymore

Hi :-)

TBH, in a room full of HN regulars, to find a developer to write a native GUI app, you can throw a brick and hire whoever says "Ow!"

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#77

Post by jlarcombe »

amiga386 wrote: post #35
LeoPanthera wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you got different menus depending on whether you middle-clicked on the icon bar icon, or you right-clicked on the icon bar icon Are you sure you're talking about RISC OS? Because you're got the overview right but your details are weird. Right-clicking never pops a menu in RISC OS. Only the middle button does that. That's why the buttons in RISC OS have names. They're not "left, middle, and right" they are "select,…

> Because you're got the overview right but your details are weird. Having just booted up RedSquirrel, yes, I accept I'm slightly misremembering. Right-clicking doesn't open a menu, it is consistently middle-click. However, it is still somewhat inconsistent. In several applications (for example, !Maestro or a filer icon), left and right click on the icon bar do the same thing, while in others (for example !Edit), onl…

I still have all my windows overlapping, and I suspect it's because my formative years were spent in RISC OS. Also I still find "File Open" dialogs weird - every app having a miniature and less-functional tiny 'Filer' built in...

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#78

Post by pjmlp »

ajb wrote: post #7

It was ahead of its time in UX, but rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security, and there was no system of shared libraries - to share code between applications, it was usual to put the shared code in a kernel module and call the kernel. Even the standard C library worked this way. Amusingly, when you invoked the system console -which was at a lower level than the gui system, ef…

Back in my day we shared code with static libraries, it appears to be quite hip in some Linux distributions nowadays.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#80

Post by pjmlp »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #47
ajb wrote: post #7

It was ahead of its time in UX, but rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security, and there was no system of shared libraries - to share code between applications, it was usual to put the shared code in a kernel module and call the kernel. Even the standard C library worked this way. Amusingly, when you invoked the system console -which was at a lower level than the gui system, ef…

> rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security I believe multi-user systems are actually an ancient, outdated rather than a "modern" concept. It made sense when computers were huge, expensive and many users shared one even at work, let alone at home. Nowadays computers are almost never shared. Even when people used to have just one home PC per family (during pre-Win7 days) they mo…

OS security always requires a concept of a user, unless you want to run all processes under the same identity.
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