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So what he's saying is: REmove all these layers because they're bad, but add these OTHER layers because they're good. Thats how you make another AmigaOS, or Be

So what he's saying is: REmove all these layers because they're bad, but add these OTHER layers because they're good. Thats how you make another AmigaOS, or Be, I'm sure Atari still has a group of a dozen folks playing with it, too. The OS's over the past 20 years haven't shown much advancement because the advancement is happening higher up the stack. You CAN'T throw out the OS and still have ARkit. A Big Bloated Mature Moore's Law needing OS is also stable, has hooks out the wazoo, AND A POPULATION USING IT. 4 guys coding in the dark on the bare metal just can't build an OS anymore, it won't have GPU access, it won't have a solid TCP/IP stack, it won't have good USB support, or caching, or a dependable file system. All of these things take a ton of time, and people, and money, and support (if you don't have money, you need the volunteers) Go build the next modern OS, I'll see you in a couple of years. I don't WANT this to sound harsh, I'm just bitter that I saw a TON of awesome, fledgling, fresh Operating systems fall by the wayside...I used BeOS, I WANTED to use BeOS, I'da LOVED it if they'd won out over NeXT (another awesome operating system...at least that survived.) At a certain level, perhaps what he wants is to leverage ChromeOS...it's 'lightweight'...but by the time it has all the tchotchkes, it'll be fat and bloated, too.

csydas 9y ago
I think the author wants a bunch of really specific personal workflow ideas/concepts they have to be the standard, which is typically what these rants are. Such rant posts are always interesting to me as I do question my own workflow just to see if there are good ideas I'm missing out on, but a lot of the author's ideas just don't strike me as all that important in most cases, and in some of the complaints, I'm not sure what the complaint is. Their complaint on the filesystem, for example, falls flat for me, but partially because I think I don't understand what they want or how BeOS did it. Maybe the author has a special meaning for "...sort by tags and metadata", but this looks to be baked right into Finder at the moment; I can add in a bunch of columns to sort by, tag my items with custom tags (and search said tags), add comments, and so on. Spotlight also has rendered a lot of organization moot as you just punch in a few bits of something about what you're looking for (tags, text within the document, document name, file type, date modified by, etc.) and you'll find it. I don't know exactly what is missing from modern OSes (Windows search isn't too bad either) that the author isn't contented with. The idea of multiple forms of interaction with the computer are okay, but quite frankly it starts to get into an eerie situation for me where I'd rather have to take a lot of steps to set up such monitoring as opposed to it being baked into the OS. I realize that I'm squarely in luddite territory given the popularity of Home Assistants (Echo, Apple Homekit, Google Home), but to me these seem like very intentional choices on the part of a customer; you have to go out of your way to get the hardware for it and disabling it is as simple as pulling the plug. Look at the non-sense we're having to deal with in regards to Windows Telemetry - to me this is what happens when such items get baked into the OS instead of being an additional application; you end up with a function you no longer can control, and for no other reason than to satisfy the complaint of "I have to download something? No thank you!" I could go on, but the author's rant just doesn't seem consistent and instead seems to just want some small features that they liked from older OSes to be returned to modern OSes. There is a huge issue with bloat and cruft and some real legacy stuff in Windows and macOS, and desktop OSes aren't getting the attention they should be, but these suggestions aren't what desktop OSes are missing or what they need.
- sirn 9y ago
  It might be worth nothing that one of BeFS's authors, Dominic Giampaolo, is currently working on APFS (and previously on Spotlight.)
  - csydas 9y ago
    A fascinating piece of trivia I was not aware of. To me it seems reasonable that instead of trying to reinvent the whole shebang that instead you get these incremental changes over time that just make an OS really really good. OS X too a lot of getting used to for me as a kid, as I had an old mac clone and an iMac with 10.1 side by side in my living room, and I loved my little mac clone. OS X didn't immediately win me over because I was just too used to OS 9 and had everything I needed on my offline mac clone. But I distinctly remember Spotlight being what really sold me on OS X because from the get-go it worked basically as intended, and man was it magnificent. If the author of Spotlight is on APFS, I have a lot of faith in it then.
- ChrisSD 9y ago
  Ars Technica did a retrospective on the BeOS filesystem[1] which may help explain things. The tl;dr of it is that the filesystem is the canonical database that all applications can use and query without any special domain specific knowledge. I'm not up to date with how MacOS works so it's possible they've added a layer on top of the filesystem which works similarly. However, I do know that Windows is nowhere near that level, mainly because it's encouraged for metadata to be stored in file specific ways. [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/06/the-beos-filesystem/2/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/06/the-b...
  - sirn 9y ago
    On the Mac, the metadata is stored in a file (inside /.Spotlight-V100) rather than inside the filesystem (a la BeOS File System). An application can provide Spotlight Importer that can extract metadata from a file during index (this is why mdimport is taking a lot of CPU time). AFAIK, this approach is contrary to the BeOS approach, where application write the metadata directly. Spotlight's approach do have few benefits, though, such as able to provide metadata for files in network drives, or for removable disks that might not be using filesystem that supports metadata.
technofiend 9y ago
Yeah gnu tried and not to be too harsh failed with mach and hurd. They designed an OS according to their principles and nobody came to the party. Heck, mach uses Linux device drivers which tells you how much effort volunteers are willing to put into each project. I don't think we'll see a change from Linux and Windows (edit: and IOS) until there's another compelling reason to switch; some feature that can't or won't be available in the other two operating systems and their surrounding ecosystems of software. When was the last time we really had a "Visicalc sold more Apples than Apples sold Visicalc" moment? I can't think of one after Linux wafflestomped all the propietary hardware and os unix vendors, or to give Apple their due, when they released the iPhone. Edit: duh, of course cloud taking over for bespoke hardware and software defined storage pushing out EMC and the like are two recent examples of industry game changers, but on the other hand both still rely primarily on Linux so my assertion about operating systems still stands.
oneplane 9y ago
On top of that, most hardware and protocol implementations are either secret and under NDA or free and open but lacking a full implementation to begin with. The post contains many idealistic proposals, but most of them boil down to lawyer stuff and money, not technical problems. You can't have nice GPU access because GPU's are secret. You can't have things work together because nobody wants to share their secret sauce. Everyone is trying to 'be the best' and get an edge on the rest, but in a way that nobody really profits from it from a technical standpoint. Aside from the shit-ton of reverse-engineering and some cleanroom design, there is very little that can be done to improve this, and no company is going to help, and thus no big pile of resources is coming to save the day. This does of course not only go for GPU's, but CPU's and their BSP's and secret management controllers as well, as the dozen or so secret binary blobs you need to get all the hardware to work at all. Fixing this from the ground up, i.e. for x86, would mean something like getting coreboot working on the recent generations of CPU's, and that's not happening at the moment due to lack of information and secret code signing keys needed to actually get a system to work.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Why people have such hope for recent efforts in specifying a open CPU ISA.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    The ISA is not important. The economics of open hardware is, and that's a much harder problem.
    - notgood 9y ago
      Probably a point in the middle would be the right compromise, most people think its binary (its closed hardware or its free+open) but I don't; I think there should be a hardware company (with all the stack: GPU + CPU + kernel) that goes the same way Epic went with Unreal (their game engine); meaning you can use their hardware for free and the specs are public but if your company evers get more than 50K in profits you have to pay them 20% of your profits; or something like that.
nialv7 9y ago
> 4 guys coding in the dark on the bare metal just can't build an OS anymore, it won't have GPU access, it won't have a solid TCP/IP stack, it won't have good USB support, or caching, or a dependable file system. Well, they wouldn't need to any more. They can adopt drivers from Linux or any other free operating systems. The inner work of a driver might be arcane, the interface to an operating system is generally well defined. Adopting a existing driver is definitely doable.

csydas 9y ago

I think the author wants a bunch of really specific personal workflow ideas/concepts they have to be the standard, which is typically what these rants are. Such rant posts are always interesting to me as I do question my own workflow just to see if there are good ideas I'm missing out on, but a lot of the author's ideas just don't strike me as all that important in most cases, and in some of the complaints, I'm not sure what the complaint is. Their complaint on the filesystem, for example, falls flat for me, but partially because I think I don't understand what they want or how BeOS did it. Maybe the author has a special meaning for "...sort by tags and metadata", but this looks to be baked right into Finder at the moment; I can add in a bunch of columns to sort by, tag my items with custom tags (and search said tags), add comments, and so on. Spotlight also has rendered a lot of organization moot as you just punch in a few bits of something about what you're looking for (tags, text within the document, document name, file type, date modified by, etc.) and you'll find it. I don't know exactly what is missing from modern OSes (Windows search isn't too bad either) that the author isn't contented with. The idea of multiple forms of interaction with the computer are okay, but quite frankly it starts to get into an eerie situation for me where I'd rather have to take a lot of steps to set up such monitoring as opposed to it being baked into the OS. I realize that I'm squarely in luddite territory given the popularity of Home Assistants (Echo, Apple Homekit, Google Home), but to me these seem like very intentional choices on the part of a customer; you have to go out of your way to get the hardware for it and disabling it is as simple as pulling the plug. Look at the non-sense we're having to deal with in regards to Windows Telemetry - to me this is what happens when such items get baked into the OS instead of being an additional application; you end up with a function you no longer can control, and for no other reason than to satisfy the complaint of "I have to download something? No thank you!" I could go on, but the author's rant just doesn't seem consistent and instead seems to just want some small features that they liked from older OSes to be returned to modern OSes. There is a huge issue with bloat and cruft and some real legacy stuff in Windows and macOS, and desktop OSes aren't getting the attention they should be, but these suggestions aren't what desktop OSes are missing or what they need.

sirn 9y ago
It might be worth nothing that one of BeFS's authors, Dominic Giampaolo, is currently working on APFS (and previously on Spotlight.)
- csydas 9y ago
  A fascinating piece of trivia I was not aware of. To me it seems reasonable that instead of trying to reinvent the whole shebang that instead you get these incremental changes over time that just make an OS really really good. OS X too a lot of getting used to for me as a kid, as I had an old mac clone and an iMac with 10.1 side by side in my living room, and I loved my little mac clone. OS X didn't immediately win me over because I was just too used to OS 9 and had everything I needed on my offline mac clone. But I distinctly remember Spotlight being what really sold me on OS X because from the get-go it worked basically as intended, and man was it magnificent. If the author of Spotlight is on APFS, I have a lot of faith in it then.
ChrisSD 9y ago
Ars Technica did a retrospective on the BeOS filesystem[1] which may help explain things. The tl;dr of it is that the filesystem is the canonical database that all applications can use and query without any special domain specific knowledge. I'm not up to date with how MacOS works so it's possible they've added a layer on top of the filesystem which works similarly. However, I do know that Windows is nowhere near that level, mainly because it's encouraged for metadata to be stored in file specific ways. [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/06/the-beos-filesystem/2/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/06/the-b...
- sirn 9y ago
  On the Mac, the metadata is stored in a file (inside /.Spotlight-V100) rather than inside the filesystem (a la BeOS File System). An application can provide Spotlight Importer that can extract metadata from a file during index (this is why mdimport is taking a lot of CPU time). AFAIK, this approach is contrary to the BeOS approach, where application write the metadata directly. Spotlight's approach do have few benefits, though, such as able to provide metadata for files in network drives, or for removable disks that might not be using filesystem that supports metadata.

technofiend 9y ago

Yeah gnu tried and not to be too harsh failed with mach and hurd. They designed an OS according to their principles and nobody came to the party. Heck, mach uses Linux device drivers which tells you how much effort volunteers are willing to put into each project. I don't think we'll see a change from Linux and Windows (edit: and IOS) until there's another compelling reason to switch; some feature that can't or won't be available in the other two operating systems and their surrounding ecosystems of software. When was the last time we really had a "Visicalc sold more Apples than Apples sold Visicalc" moment? I can't think of one after Linux wafflestomped all the propietary hardware and os unix vendors, or to give Apple their due, when they released the iPhone. Edit: duh, of course cloud taking over for bespoke hardware and software defined storage pushing out EMC and the like are two recent examples of industry game changers, but on the other hand both still rely primarily on Linux so my assertion about operating systems still stands.

oneplane 9y ago

On top of that, most hardware and protocol implementations are either secret and under NDA or free and open but lacking a full implementation to begin with. The post contains many idealistic proposals, but most of them boil down to lawyer stuff and money, not technical problems. You can't have nice GPU access because GPU's are secret. You can't have things work together because nobody wants to share their secret sauce. Everyone is trying to 'be the best' and get an edge on the rest, but in a way that nobody really profits from it from a technical standpoint. Aside from the shit-ton of reverse-engineering and some cleanroom design, there is very little that can be done to improve this, and no company is going to help, and thus no big pile of resources is coming to save the day. This does of course not only go for GPU's, but CPU's and their BSP's and secret management controllers as well, as the dozen or so secret binary blobs you need to get all the hardware to work at all. Fixing this from the ground up, i.e. for x86, would mean something like getting coreboot working on the recent generations of CPU's, and that's not happening at the moment due to lack of information and secret code signing keys needed to actually get a system to work.

digi_owl 9y ago
Why people have such hope for recent efforts in specifying a open CPU ISA.
- pjc50 9y ago
  The ISA is not important. The economics of open hardware is, and that's a much harder problem.
  - notgood 9y ago
    Probably a point in the middle would be the right compromise, most people think its binary (its closed hardware or its free+open) but I don't; I think there should be a hardware company (with all the stack: GPU + CPU + kernel) that goes the same way Epic went with Unreal (their game engine); meaning you can use their hardware for free and the specs are public but if your company evers get more than 50K in profits you have to pay them 20% of your profits; or something like that.

nialv7 9y ago

> 4 guys coding in the dark on the bare metal just can't build an OS anymore, it won't have GPU access, it won't have a solid TCP/IP stack, it won't have good USB support, or caching, or a dependable file system. Well, they wouldn't need to any more. They can adopt drivers from Linux or any other free operating systems. The inner work of a driver might be arcane, the interface to an operating system is generally well defined. Adopting a existing driver is definitely doable.