4 ms·

I feel like operating system implies the existence of a kernel

• bluetomcat 3y ago
  An application that spawns processes/apps/modules, controls them and lets them communicate back to the application for some service is also, in a loose sense, an operating system.
  • trealira 3y ago
    That seems a bit too loose. Doesn't that apply to IDEs that implement the language server protocol, since they spawn language servers and communicate with them? And servers like Apache that spawn child processes to handle requests?
    • chuckadams 3y ago
      Apache supervises tasks in the form of threads and subprocesses, including managing memory in the form of pools, so yes, it's doing some of what an OS would do. It isn't, on the other hand, providing abstractions to hardware, and that's what I think of when I hear "OS". It's not really a cut-and-dried thing though: modern web browsers are like 90% of the way to being full-blown OS's, even down to abstracting hardware in the case of things like WebGPU, but they still rely on a host OS to bridge the connection and do the actual bit-banging required to make it work.
• mikepurvis 3y ago
  Robot Operating System (ROS) is also an operating system, but it runs on top of computer operating systems like Linux and MacOS, and is focused on supplying the services, build toolchain, and communication standards/paradigms that are useful for implementing a robotics system, much as Linux (and its distros) are focused on providing that for a general computing environment. In any case, it's clear that the project under discussion here isn't really any of these things is rather a system shell/GUI/launcher. But calling it an "OS" falls under the fun tradition many of us enjoyed in our youth of trying to recreate our own Windows in whatever was our programming platform of choice, and thinking that was what an OS was.