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I feel like the third sentence of this post should've been the title: "Can we make a friendly Libre Desktop operating system with focus on simplicity, minimali

I feel like the third sentence of this post should've been the title: "Can we make a friendly Libre Desktop operating system with focus on simplicity, minimalist elegance, and usability?" I like that idea. Having lived through the 80s and 90s personal computing era, I can say there was very little that was easy. Especially the 80s. Everything was also super expensive. Things crashed all the time, I can remember hitting Save and having a program crash and losing work. Because I saved, so I wouldn't lose work. It took so much work to do anything back then. I guess it's easy to forget how much everything sucked. I don't disagree with the central idea here though. I do think something that focuses on simplicity, minimalist elegance, and usability is a nice idea. Though I can't imagine many people agree.

fabrice_d 6y ago
I think Elementary (https://elementary.io/ https://elementary.io/) is aiming at being that kind of OS. And it's really good!
- dghlsakjg 6y ago
  I tried out running elementary in a vm on my mac. It was actually a snappy responsive system even though it was inside a VM. Everything about that is amazing
- 7thaccount 6y ago
  That's just a fork of Ubuntu LTS right? There are many many lightweight Linux distros that are probably much smaller.
  - fabrice_d 6y ago
    No, it's not just a Ubuntu fork. Many apps are elementary specific, written in Vala iirc.
    - 7thaccount 6y ago
      So a commercial Ubuntu fork with some custom apps, got it. Still hardly groundbreaking though right? I'm thinking more of something like HaikuOS if you want something completely out there.
Shared404 6y ago
I do like the concept the author puts foward, but there's also quite a bit there I disagree with. The author rails against security features, which I think we can all agree are pretty important these days. > I don't disagree with the central idea here though. I do think something that focuses on simplicity, minimalist elegance, and usability is a nice idea. Indeed. I've been playing around with OpenBSD on a old ThinkPad I picked out of some recycling, and I think I'm getting there. I'm also looking at throwing Plan9 on a spare Raspberry Pi I have floating around and playing with that.
- bawolff 6y ago
  > which I think we can all agree are pretty important these days. And pretty important back in the day, eventhough they didn't exist yet. Viri and malware, well still a thing, are nothing like they used to be.
blippage 6y ago
"Can we make a friendly Libre Desktop operating system with focus on simplicity, minimalist elegance, and usability?" The author mentions "Decoupling of the hardware from the OS and of the OS from the applications" I've been fooling around with Raspberry Pis, and like the idea of bare metal programming. Unfortunately, it isn't so easy, because something like USB requires a software stack. How much better it would be if all the hardware was memory-mapped! Then we wouldn't need an OS at all if we didn't want one. So, I'm still waiting for Raspberry Pis to be what they should have been in the first place. Pi's seem to be going the wrong way simplicity-wise. Maybe one day someone will come up with a RISC-V machine that satisfies this niche. Such a machine would be many many years away, though.

fabrice_d 6y ago

I think Elementary (https://elementary.io/ https://elementary.io/) is aiming at being that kind of OS. And it's really good!

dghlsakjg 6y ago
I tried out running elementary in a vm on my mac. It was actually a snappy responsive system even though it was inside a VM. Everything about that is amazing
7thaccount 6y ago
That's just a fork of Ubuntu LTS right? There are many many lightweight Linux distros that are probably much smaller.
- fabrice_d 6y ago
  No, it's not just a Ubuntu fork. Many apps are elementary specific, written in Vala iirc.
  - 7thaccount 6y ago
    So a commercial Ubuntu fork with some custom apps, got it. Still hardly groundbreaking though right? I'm thinking more of something like HaikuOS if you want something completely out there.

Shared404 6y ago

I do like the concept the author puts foward, but there's also quite a bit there I disagree with. The author rails against security features, which I think we can all agree are pretty important these days. > I don't disagree with the central idea here though. I do think something that focuses on simplicity, minimalist elegance, and usability is a nice idea. Indeed. I've been playing around with OpenBSD on a old ThinkPad I picked out of some recycling, and I think I'm getting there. I'm also looking at throwing Plan9 on a spare Raspberry Pi I have floating around and playing with that.

bawolff 6y ago
> which I think we can all agree are pretty important these days. And pretty important back in the day, eventhough they didn't exist yet. Viri and malware, well still a thing, are nothing like they used to be.

blippage 6y ago

"Can we make a friendly Libre Desktop operating system with focus on simplicity, minimalist elegance, and usability?" The author mentions "Decoupling of the hardware from the OS and of the OS from the applications" I've been fooling around with Raspberry Pis, and like the idea of bare metal programming. Unfortunately, it isn't so easy, because something like USB requires a software stack. How much better it would be if all the hardware was memory-mapped! Then we wouldn't need an OS at all if we didn't want one. So, I'm still waiting for Raspberry Pis to be what they should have been in the first place. Pi's seem to be going the wrong way simplicity-wise. Maybe one day someone will come up with a RISC-V machine that satisfies this niche. Such a machine would be many many years away, though.