3 ms·

I'm not interested in any capitalist perspective of an OS- this kind of thinking is exactly why I'm using a damn teletype emulator. Profitable, "successful" com

I'm not interested in any capitalist perspective of an OS- this kind of thinking is exactly why I'm using a damn teletype emulator. Profitable, "successful" computing that gets more than "a handful" of users is web tech. They can keep it. I'll just stop at the top- no, I can't use Linux as a base, except perhaps as a host for a virtual system. For me I've been playing with uxn, but Inferno does exist. And you're right, using Inferno on a stripped Linux system WOULD be better than using Linux.

Karrot_Kream 5y ago
How is an OS "capitalist"? What...?
- witheld 5y ago
  That's all OP cares about, success. To them, computing isn't worth it if it's not popular. There's no reason to write code that won't be used, no reason to research if it won't literally change the landscape of consumer computing. But consumer computing will never change, it will remain made of a stack of legacy parts in a trenchcoat. The only real change we've gotten in a decade is Vulkan/DX12- and those APIs just expose graphics the way consoles do. We've done that for decades it's still not new. Research because it's fun, because it's an artistic outlet. make tiny virtual computers you can run in weird places and then run them in weird places! Because you can! Learn because it is engaging, and because sharing what you learn is rewarding.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    My family comes from a country that only economically liberalized in the last 25 years. Trust me, popularity is _not_ a capitalist thing. Capitalism feeds into pageant show dynamics, absolutely, but popularity is still a driving force in non-capitalist economies. There's nothing wrong with playing around with these concepts for purely recreational/artistic reasons, but I don't think that's where OP is coming from. OP talks about their reasoning in a sibling comment.
  - glangdale 5y ago
    You mistake my reasons. Popularity is not an end in itself. Popularity, in this case, is a requirement to capture meaningful workloads to test what is purportedly a research operating system. The reason that Plan 9 failed as a platform for exploring OS design (not strictly speaking "OS research" in a narrow sense) is that modern workloads didn't run there. Honestly, who cares which platform supports a handful of processes running the moral equivalent of xclock, a few shells, a 1980s looking terminal and the occasional build? This isn't a proxy for anything that anyone cares about, and all modern hardware is ludicrously overpowered to do that. Give me a modern machine, and I could probably write you something that simulated a decent-looking 1989-level experience in pure Python (I am not saying this is a good idea). It rapidly became impossible to test any meaningful ideas on Plan 9 because what consensus reality regards as "software" doesn't really run there. This filters down into potentially bad decisions about design of OS and runtimes. You can't test out ideas that come from anywhere outside your narrow circle of "the Unix room and miscellaneous fanboys and trainspotters". For example, is "everything is a file" a good abstraction for a modern graphical interface of any kind? Who knows, we'll never see one ported to Plan 9, just a bunch of bitblt-level fingerpainting. If Plan 9 had stayed popular (there's that word) enough to attract enough users to matter, maybe we could have explored these ideas. Not necessarily building a dumb clone of Windows and doing everything the same way, but having enough interoperability to make it a plausible daily driver.
    - witheld 5y ago
      "Popular", "Modern Workloads", "meaningful ideas" You are a buzzword machine with no substance. All of these are nothing more than an obsession with some idea of success. Will modern apps, workloads, quote on quote "meaningful" things run on uxn? No! But we can still research what you can do with modern aspirations and knowledge on an 8bit computer. The goal is not to run some existing software, the goal is to learn. To make new software, new workloads, new ideas. If you want to run "modern workloads", these days just grab a web browser- you can probably even do your GPU research in there! Do that, that's wonderful if your research is about things you can do on normal operating systems like a web browser. But if your research is about computers, you probably need to say, design a new computer (uxn) or expose yourself to different kinds of computers. I suggest you do both, write a compiler and write a VM for it! You'll get maybe a dozen users, and you'll learn, and you'll teach people things. All without any "success"

Karrot_Kream 5y ago

How is an OS "capitalist"? What...?

witheld 5y ago
That's all OP cares about, success. To them, computing isn't worth it if it's not popular. There's no reason to write code that won't be used, no reason to research if it won't literally change the landscape of consumer computing. But consumer computing will never change, it will remain made of a stack of legacy parts in a trenchcoat. The only real change we've gotten in a decade is Vulkan/DX12- and those APIs just expose graphics the way consoles do. We've done that for decades it's still not new. Research because it's fun, because it's an artistic outlet. make tiny virtual computers you can run in weird places and then run them in weird places! Because you can! Learn because it is engaging, and because sharing what you learn is rewarding.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  My family comes from a country that only economically liberalized in the last 25 years. Trust me, popularity is _not_ a capitalist thing. Capitalism feeds into pageant show dynamics, absolutely, but popularity is still a driving force in non-capitalist economies. There's nothing wrong with playing around with these concepts for purely recreational/artistic reasons, but I don't think that's where OP is coming from. OP talks about their reasoning in a sibling comment.
- glangdale 5y ago
  You mistake my reasons. Popularity is not an end in itself. Popularity, in this case, is a requirement to capture meaningful workloads to test what is purportedly a research operating system. The reason that Plan 9 failed as a platform for exploring OS design (not strictly speaking "OS research" in a narrow sense) is that modern workloads didn't run there. Honestly, who cares which platform supports a handful of processes running the moral equivalent of xclock, a few shells, a 1980s looking terminal and the occasional build? This isn't a proxy for anything that anyone cares about, and all modern hardware is ludicrously overpowered to do that. Give me a modern machine, and I could probably write you something that simulated a decent-looking 1989-level experience in pure Python (I am not saying this is a good idea). It rapidly became impossible to test any meaningful ideas on Plan 9 because what consensus reality regards as "software" doesn't really run there. This filters down into potentially bad decisions about design of OS and runtimes. You can't test out ideas that come from anywhere outside your narrow circle of "the Unix room and miscellaneous fanboys and trainspotters". For example, is "everything is a file" a good abstraction for a modern graphical interface of any kind? Who knows, we'll never see one ported to Plan 9, just a bunch of bitblt-level fingerpainting. If Plan 9 had stayed popular (there's that word) enough to attract enough users to matter, maybe we could have explored these ideas. Not necessarily building a dumb clone of Windows and doing everything the same way, but having enough interoperability to make it a plausible daily driver.
  - witheld 5y ago
    "Popular", "Modern Workloads", "meaningful ideas" You are a buzzword machine with no substance. All of these are nothing more than an obsession with some idea of success. Will modern apps, workloads, quote on quote "meaningful" things run on uxn? No! But we can still research what you can do with modern aspirations and knowledge on an 8bit computer. The goal is not to run some existing software, the goal is to learn. To make new software, new workloads, new ideas. If you want to run "modern workloads", these days just grab a web browser- you can probably even do your GPU research in there! Do that, that's wonderful if your research is about things you can do on normal operating systems like a web browser. But if your research is about computers, you probably need to say, design a new computer (uxn) or expose yourself to different kinds of computers. I suggest you do both, write a compiler and write a VM for it! You'll get maybe a dozen users, and you'll learn, and you'll teach people things. All without any "success"