To be clear, I was asking for a distillation of the novel parts of Urbit, without all the obscurantism (and I do think there is novelty; the Plunder project see

To be clear, I was asking for a distillation of the novel parts of Urbit, without all the obscurantism (and I do think there is novelty; the Plunder project seems to be evidence of that) I don't agree with the post that says it's a derivative of Nix. Nix is interesting, and there are some common ideas, but it doesn't make any sense to say Urbit derives from it The 2010 post cites Arc and VPRI as other "software from scratch" efforts What other "software from scratch" efforts have extended into the realm of networking? Nix/Guix don't tackle that problem or claim to -- e.g. it doesn't make sense to write a chat app "running in" Nix/Guix because they are package managers, not OSes. The OS is Linux; the networking stack is the Internet. --- It's also an open question how self-hosted Urbit really is though ... if there's not an instantiation of it that's outside of Unix/Windows/the Internet, then I would say it falls short of "software from scratch". Also, it seems like the current dev process leans heavily on cloud software; it's not really self-hosted or self-sustaining. Is it really a computer, or is it an app running inside existing computers? The uxn system that's gotten a bunch of attention on HN is interesting because it does run on hardware, divorced from Unix/Windows - https://100r.co/site/uxn.html https://100r.co/site/uxn.html (but it also doesn't tackle networking)