3 ms·

"Educational operating system" makes me think of an OS that's designed for delivering educational content, not one that's an example operating system for learni

"Educational operating system" makes me think of an OS that's designed for delivering educational content, not one that's an example operating system for learning bare-metal coding. I wonder if "model" might be a better word to use.

shadowcodex 11y ago
I agree as I was slightly mislead by the title. Very cool project though!!!
xfitm3 11y ago
I didn't make that connection at all. I was fully expecting an OS to teach me about bare metal programming semantics.
marvy 11y ago
shadowcodex: your comment is showing as "dead".
EdNutting 11y ago
This is an interesting issue - how people interpet the name seems to come out 50/50 between "OS for learning OS dev" and "OS for educational content". In my experience, people's backgrounds are the biggest factor affecting which they think of. We're reluctant to go with "model" OS or similar because we're not actually implementing anything like an ideal OS - we don't use optimised algorithms for example. The idea being that you can learn/teach the OS concept using a simple implementation (and readable code) and then students/developers can optimise as an exercise/extension/for a real OS. So it's not a "model" OS but is an "example" OS to use to teach the key concepts. Unfortunately, "example" OS leads people to think our OS is practical as a basis for a real OS, which it isn't and we don't want to give the impression we're trying to rival Linux/Windows/OSX/etc. No name seems to give a universally correct and good first impression!
- michel-slm 11y ago
  As someone who has taken an advanced OS class that involves implementing portions of such an educational / teaching OS, I also perceive "educational" to mean "for learning OS dev". The other side of the spectrum for me is "research" and "proof of concept" OSes though - like House (written in Haskell) or Singularity and Midori.

shadowcodex 11y ago

I agree as I was slightly mislead by the title. Very cool project though!!!

xfitm3 11y ago

I didn't make that connection at all. I was fully expecting an OS to teach me about bare metal programming semantics.

marvy 11y ago

shadowcodex: your comment is showing as "dead".

EdNutting 11y ago

This is an interesting issue - how people interpet the name seems to come out 50/50 between "OS for learning OS dev" and "OS for educational content". In my experience, people's backgrounds are the biggest factor affecting which they think of. We're reluctant to go with "model" OS or similar because we're not actually implementing anything like an ideal OS - we don't use optimised algorithms for example. The idea being that you can learn/teach the OS concept using a simple implementation (and readable code) and then students/developers can optimise as an exercise/extension/for a real OS. So it's not a "model" OS but is an "example" OS to use to teach the key concepts. Unfortunately, "example" OS leads people to think our OS is practical as a basis for a real OS, which it isn't and we don't want to give the impression we're trying to rival Linux/Windows/OSX/etc. No name seems to give a universally correct and good first impression!

michel-slm 11y ago
As someone who has taken an advanced OS class that involves implementing portions of such an educational / teaching OS, I also perceive "educational" to mean "for learning OS dev". The other side of the spectrum for me is "research" and "proof of concept" OSes though - like House (written in Haskell) or Singularity and Midori.