Not going to admonish the devs for doing what they like in their own time. There are a lot of hobby OS out there and they are fun to tinker around with for a few minutes.
And this is likely my own personal nitpick. But honestly rather than starting something new I would really like to see someone adopt and modernize something like Plan 9 or Inferno. A few years ago there was a group trying to do a more modern user-centered version of plan 9. Complete with a lot of the more modern apps that users would want to use on such a system. I think once they saw the actual scope that the project would require, it kind of silently sputtered out to the best of my knowledge. Those operating systems were so ahead of their time. Linux is only just now catching up in some ways.
LOL though I’m sure I will still download the image and pop it open in vert manager for a few minutes later today
I feel the same way about Linux distros.
There’s something like 500+ actively updated distros. 39% (according to some random article from 2020) are used by less than 0.1% of users.
Y’all… Spend that time and energy other open source projects that need the help!
For many it’s just a hobby. But I really think with the way certain things are falling into place. Now would definitely be a good time for a few projects at least to get focused. With RISC V on the horizon, as well as a few basic open source GPU implementations. This would be a perfect time for a BSD or something similar to dive in heavy and establish themselves as a primary player for that sort of hardware.
But a lot of these obvious coders Etc and their projects also help shape future paradigms and push projects forward in their own way. So it’s still exciting to see what comes of them. It’s why all these years later I still check in from time to time on React OS.
Fair point. I also code useless silly things as a hobby, so I guess maybe I’m no one to talk. But I also don’t have the skills to peak around the Linux Mint errors list and just give one or two a go, which, selfishly, benefits me as a Mint user.
You never know when you will find another college student from Finland who happens to be in just the right place at just the right time for their hobby project to blow up.
Right now though it’s something to Marvel at. That something like Linux or Linux Mint even exists and is as usable as it is.
9front? I thought that was still pretty active with new releases steadily coming out.
Nah, the front fell off. Yes they are still kicking. But they are more just maintaining plan 9 largely as it existed.
I think it was harvey? They planned to do things a little more sacrilegious. Offering desktop environments other than Rio out of the box. Bringing over compiles for Firefox Etc. And providing a simple easy to use installer like many Linux distributions these days. Sort of like the Ubuntu of Plan 9.
Yeah, makes sense. I think they sort of just missed the boat :-(. I mean, the research that went into it birthed UTF-8, /proc and /sys, a lot of really good things that managed to make it in super-watered-down form into modern operating systems. But I think that if you want to make a modern OS that gets any kind of traction today, it needs to live on the web as opposed to on someone’s personal computer, sad to say.
I think if you wanted to get serious about bringing those ideas into the modern day you would need to just rewrite it from scratch within a different context with a different scope.
That’s literally the niche inferno and plan were designed for. Plan was designed so that local and remote were abstracted away. Everything was just a data stream. You could run inferno literally in a browser. Which you don’t get much more in the web than that lol.
Specifically inferno is what android sort of half was. Android traditionally heavily leveraged java/dalvik bytecode for apps. But the root system was native. The bytecode ran on top of that. Inferno pushed the bytecode all the way to the micro kernel.
I still install other os like all these regularly. The thing that has kept me from keeping them. Is lack of a few basic things like modern web browsers. I hear haiku is making progress in that front at least. I have fond memories of running Be on an old Pentium II.
Hm. TIL Inferno; I read but I still don’t feel like I understand it. What I was talking about was a little bit more of a browser-native “OS” shell if you want to call it that… I feel like the kind of ease of interaction that people have on the command line on a Unix system still doesn’t really exist for any type of web resource that I’m interacting with. It’s all separate systems without much unifying access or principle.
Maybe Inferno would have been the answer (like I say I read a little bit still don’t really grasp it), but the WP page seems to say that Lucent didn’t really have a coherent way to deploy or market it and so even it being a good idea wouldn’t really have saved it from obscurity. :-( Like I say it is sad overall, these things were better than the stuff we have around now.
