7 ms·

Their philosophy makes me think they should just use Windows XP/7 or something and call it a day. Offline first? “past-proofing”? These are desktop and console

Their philosophy makes me think they should just use Windows XP/7 or something and call it a day. Offline first? “past-proofing”? These are desktop and console programs where the OS vendors have spent onerous amounts of capital to maintain backward API compatibility. In other words: Windows and Win32, and nothing but. Everything else, including the Web, has been broken and deprecated several times over.

mikae1 2y ago
https://git.sr.ht/~vdupras/duskos https://git.sr.ht/~vdupras/duskos > Dusk OS is a 32-bit Forth and big brother to Collapse OS. Its primary purpose is to be maximally useful during the first stage of civilizational collapse, that is, when we can't produce modern computers anymore but that there's still many modern computers around.
- Bluestein 2y ago
  > 32-bit Forth OS mixed with C I mean, what's not to love here? :)
  - kragen 2y ago
    the z80 more generally, collapseos is cosplay, not engineering in more detail, collapseos is not a pragmatic engineering effort to foster resiliency, but an essentially religious effort to atone for the sins of the worldly through ascetic renunciation of pleasures such as guis, returning to an imagined arcadian past of austere virtue see against-collapseos.md in http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/pavnotes2.git http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/pavnotes2.git for the full critique
    - mburns 2y ago
      DuskOS != CollapseOS (same author, the latter inspired the former). DuskOS doesn’t run on z80. It’s i386 or ARM. Whether that makes it a serious effort or not is still up for debate.
      - kragen 2y ago
        apologies! i haven't investigated duskos in any detail and so whatever opinions i may have about it are not worth considering
    - pmarreck 2y ago
      that URL leads directly to what looks like the contents of a .git directory (so, all the metainformation but no project directory listing) I'm curious because I buy this comment more than their mission statement, although I absolutely agree with their stance on the "longevity/maintainability problem" in software and hardware. but as soon as I saw the ranting about colonialism I was like "oh... basically, anarchist anti-capitalists" as soon as they have kids, they will quickly abandon their non-acquisition of resources stance, LOL
      - kragen 2y ago
        cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41133098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41133098 collapseos isn't a 100r thing, and i haven't seen anything from virgil that sounds like an anarchist anti-capitalist. i have a lot of sympathies for the anarchist anti-capitalist point of view although personally i've suffered a lot more harm from anti-capitalism than from capitalism
        pmarreck 2y ago
        I have sympathies for it too. But I am also not at all surprised by your "harmed more by anti-caps than caps" statement. The funny thing about having a kid (he's 3) is that you are forced to re-evaluate all your values and preconceived notions to see what it is you really want to transmit to your kid.
        kragen 2y ago
        well, i live in argentina, see, so i've had the opportunity to live under an anti-capitalist government. if you've only lived in a society where capitalists have all the power then it would be unsurprising if the powerless anti-capitalists haven't harmed you
        kragen 2y ago
        somehow i missed that you said 'not at all surprised', oops
    - copx 2y ago
      I can't see the file there.
      - kragen 2y ago
        it's a git repo, you have to clone it i've added a header to that effect since it seems to have been confusing people
        djur 2y ago
        There's something ironic about condemning someone for "ascetic renunciation of pleasures such as guis" and publishing it as a Markdown file available only by cloning a git repo.
        kragen 2y ago
        the markdown file does say that this point of view resonates with me ;) there are other advantages as well. if someone clones the git repo, they'll still be able to read it after i die and my site goes down; and there's no incentive for anyone to pressure me to rewrite history by deleting things from it, which is a thing that has happened to me in the past, since i can't delete them from remote clones
    - samatman 2y ago
      I'm somewhat surprised that this is your take on the project. I agree with some of it in modified form, such as pointing out that far more powerful systems like old Android phones are sitting around in great quantity and would be a useful scavenge for a complete CollapseOS. In fact that seems to be what DuskOS is about, I'll be interested in your take on that once you have one. But those are not microcontrollers, and what microcontrollers do can't be replaced by sticking a JTAG on an abandoned Android and calling it a day. Your take on the availability for scavenge of 6502s is simply incorrect, Western Digital, who should know, says annual production is in the hundreds of millions, joining the estimated 5 to 10 billion which already exist. https://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/ https://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/ It strikes me as a quixotic, but worthwhile, investment in civilizational insurance. I don't disagree about the motive at all, but it seems like a useful outlet for that sort of angst. If he keeps at it long enough I would hope he'll support a few more chips, and that seems likely, as I remember a time when it was Z80 only. Variants on that chip exist in their billions as well, although the original was taken off the market, hmm. This April.
      - kragen 2y ago
        i'm surprised to hear 6502s are being produced in quantity! thank you for the correction. any idea what they are used in? i've never found one ripping apart a tv, vcr, printer, dvd player, vacuum cleaner, power supply, radio, lab data recorder, washing machine, etc. i've found 8051 clones, 68000s, weird epson microcontrollers without a publicly documented instruction set, pals, z80 clones with dsp bolted on, and i've seen other people report pics and stm32s, but never a 6502 except in the drean brand commodore 64 i have here looking on digikey i can't find any 6502 or 65c02 parts, although there are a couple of sbcs like https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/olimex-ltd/NEO6502/22078296 https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/olimex-ltd/NEO650.... digikey of course doesn't have everything, but they're usually an okay indicator of what is popular i agree that android phones cannot substitute for microcontrollers! their cortex-a cpus can't guarantee hard real-time responsiveness. and i agree with virgil's point that microcontrollers are very important for practical everyday things. and 6502s make perfectly good microcontrollers, albeit more power-hungry than designs fabbed in a smaller feature size, and requiring external memory while the z80 itself is no longer made, plenty of clones of it are, and a z80 is also perfectly fine as a microcontroller, and a 6502 or z80 is close to the smallest machine on which a self-hosting development environment is feasible
- stonethrowaway 2y ago
  [flagged]
Bluestein 2y ago
The way you put it, it makes sense.- PS. For many XP was some sort of "sweetspot", as far as Win OSs are concerned.- PS. Then again, it depends. How much evidence of "past-proof"-ness do you need - in terms of "backstory" to meet that requirement? Linux, or - even better - some BSD variants go way further back.-
- senorrib 2y ago
  Windows has become a garbage pile of spyware lately, but even Linux can't really compare to the insane level of backwards compatibility Windows offers.
  - anticorporate 2y ago
    > even Linux can't really compare to the insane level of backwards compatibility Windows offers. My experience is quite the opposite. I still play the Windows Entertainment Pack version of Tetris. In Linux, thanks to Wine, it just works. In Windows 10, I'm told to contact the publisher for a new version.
    - lmm 2y ago
      Emulators tend to be better for compatibility than live systems. Did you try using Wine on windows? And if you take a similar-vintage Linux program, you may well find it runs more easily under SFU or WSL on Windows than on a current version of Linux.
  - pmarreck 2y ago
    NixOS can. Because literally every piece of software in the Nix repo includes all dependencies (including things like build dependencies, not just runtime dependencies) that existed at the time it was built, all the way down to the metal basically
    - kragen 2y ago
      well, all the way down to the kernel, not the metal
pushfoo 2y ago
TL;DR: They already wrote Varvara[1] + software[2] for it My understanding is: * The authors wanted to run on a Raspberry Pi powered by solar + batteries * They're often somewhere in the Pacific so their internet connection is often bad * Varvara[1] is the portable-enough solution which works for them * Others liked it enough to write a bunch of other tools[2] It's all pretty much self-hosting at this point. It's not for everyone, but why bother with Windows if it fits your needs? [1]: https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/varvara.html https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/varvara.html [2]: https://github.com/hundredrabbits/awesome-uxn?tab=readme-ov-file#applications https://github.com/hundredrabbits/awesome-uxn?tab=readme-ov-...
anthk 2y ago
They run 9front, much better than XP and 7. No reinstalls, no DLL hells, everything it's statically compiled, updates can be done totally in place and offline. Good luck running Windows 7 on an RPI and with a laughable power draw. Oh, and don't even compare VS + MSDN documentations (huge GB's wasted) vs what Acme can do and just the plan9's 9.intro.pdf book. The disk usage would wear out any SD in days. 9front, otoh, can even selfcompile itself in a breeze. Try that under Windows.
- Bluestein 2y ago
  The constraints under which they work are wonderful. Power included. It basically mandates excellence, efficiency.-
  - anthk 2y ago
    Not just that. For any non-JS web, they can compile and share netsurf offline from 9front and happily post at HN or read lots of sites such as http://68k.news http://68k.news and https://midnight.pub https://midnight.pub And, with a Gemini client for 9front (there are a few), between the gemini 'capsules' (sites and blogs) and gemini://gemi.dev (web decrafying proxy to gemini, where you can read news stripping out the 95% of the pages, scripts, trackers and all the bullshit, they can get totally covered. Gopher9 (Gopher client) makes a good point with gopher://magical.fish for global news, translation services and such. Much less bandwidth spent than the web, for sure. With a bare irc client (again, literally few lines of shell scripting under 9front due how's designed) they can connect to the public IRC servers from bitlbee.org and connect to modern disservices such as Discord and Slack, at least being able to chat against their peers.
  - Avshalom 2y ago
    The thing is, while it might mandate efficiency, what they made was an un optimized 8 bit VM synthesizing 16bit arithmetic running on 64 bit hardware. It's not efficient at all, it's just that the constraints they gave themselves leaves enormous amount of power on the table.
    - 2y ago
mephitix 2y ago
I think their philosophy / research is in understanding how to build modern software that is more resilient. So from that research/exploration standpoint it makes sense to me they would go that route instead of using older tech

mikae1 2y ago

https://git.sr.ht/~vdupras/duskos https://git.sr.ht/~vdupras/duskos > Dusk OS is a 32-bit Forth and big brother to Collapse OS. Its primary purpose is to be maximally useful during the first stage of civilizational collapse, that is, when we can't produce modern computers anymore but that there's still many modern computers around.

Bluestein 2y ago
> 32-bit Forth OS mixed with C I mean, what's not to love here? :)
- kragen 2y ago
  the z80 more generally, collapseos is cosplay, not engineering in more detail, collapseos is not a pragmatic engineering effort to foster resiliency, but an essentially religious effort to atone for the sins of the worldly through ascetic renunciation of pleasures such as guis, returning to an imagined arcadian past of austere virtue see against-collapseos.md in http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/pavnotes2.git http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/pavnotes2.git for the full critique
  - mburns 2y ago
    DuskOS != CollapseOS (same author, the latter inspired the former). DuskOS doesn’t run on z80. It’s i386 or ARM. Whether that makes it a serious effort or not is still up for debate.
    - kragen 2y ago
      apologies! i haven't investigated duskos in any detail and so whatever opinions i may have about it are not worth considering
  - pmarreck 2y ago
    that URL leads directly to what looks like the contents of a .git directory (so, all the metainformation but no project directory listing) I'm curious because I buy this comment more than their mission statement, although I absolutely agree with their stance on the "longevity/maintainability problem" in software and hardware. but as soon as I saw the ranting about colonialism I was like "oh... basically, anarchist anti-capitalists" as soon as they have kids, they will quickly abandon their non-acquisition of resources stance, LOL
    - kragen 2y ago
      cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41133098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41133098 collapseos isn't a 100r thing, and i haven't seen anything from virgil that sounds like an anarchist anti-capitalist. i have a lot of sympathies for the anarchist anti-capitalist point of view although personally i've suffered a lot more harm from anti-capitalism than from capitalism
      - pmarreck 2y ago
        I have sympathies for it too. But I am also not at all surprised by your "harmed more by anti-caps than caps" statement. The funny thing about having a kid (he's 3) is that you are forced to re-evaluate all your values and preconceived notions to see what it is you really want to transmit to your kid.
        kragen 2y ago
        well, i live in argentina, see, so i've had the opportunity to live under an anti-capitalist government. if you've only lived in a society where capitalists have all the power then it would be unsurprising if the powerless anti-capitalists haven't harmed you
        kragen 2y ago
        somehow i missed that you said 'not at all surprised', oops
  - copx 2y ago
    I can't see the file there.
    - kragen 2y ago
      it's a git repo, you have to clone it i've added a header to that effect since it seems to have been confusing people
      - djur 2y ago
        There's something ironic about condemning someone for "ascetic renunciation of pleasures such as guis" and publishing it as a Markdown file available only by cloning a git repo.
        kragen 2y ago
        the markdown file does say that this point of view resonates with me ;) there are other advantages as well. if someone clones the git repo, they'll still be able to read it after i die and my site goes down; and there's no incentive for anyone to pressure me to rewrite history by deleting things from it, which is a thing that has happened to me in the past, since i can't delete them from remote clones
  - samatman 2y ago
    I'm somewhat surprised that this is your take on the project. I agree with some of it in modified form, such as pointing out that far more powerful systems like old Android phones are sitting around in great quantity and would be a useful scavenge for a complete CollapseOS. In fact that seems to be what DuskOS is about, I'll be interested in your take on that once you have one. But those are not microcontrollers, and what microcontrollers do can't be replaced by sticking a JTAG on an abandoned Android and calling it a day. Your take on the availability for scavenge of 6502s is simply incorrect, Western Digital, who should know, says annual production is in the hundreds of millions, joining the estimated 5 to 10 billion which already exist. https://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/ https://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/ It strikes me as a quixotic, but worthwhile, investment in civilizational insurance. I don't disagree about the motive at all, but it seems like a useful outlet for that sort of angst. If he keeps at it long enough I would hope he'll support a few more chips, and that seems likely, as I remember a time when it was Z80 only. Variants on that chip exist in their billions as well, although the original was taken off the market, hmm. This April.
    - kragen 2y ago
      i'm surprised to hear 6502s are being produced in quantity! thank you for the correction. any idea what they are used in? i've never found one ripping apart a tv, vcr, printer, dvd player, vacuum cleaner, power supply, radio, lab data recorder, washing machine, etc. i've found 8051 clones, 68000s, weird epson microcontrollers without a publicly documented instruction set, pals, z80 clones with dsp bolted on, and i've seen other people report pics and stm32s, but never a 6502 except in the drean brand commodore 64 i have here looking on digikey i can't find any 6502 or 65c02 parts, although there are a couple of sbcs like https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/olimex-ltd/NEO6502/22078296 https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/olimex-ltd/NEO650.... digikey of course doesn't have everything, but they're usually an okay indicator of what is popular i agree that android phones cannot substitute for microcontrollers! their cortex-a cpus can't guarantee hard real-time responsiveness. and i agree with virgil's point that microcontrollers are very important for practical everyday things. and 6502s make perfectly good microcontrollers, albeit more power-hungry than designs fabbed in a smaller feature size, and requiring external memory while the z80 itself is no longer made, plenty of clones of it are, and a z80 is also perfectly fine as a microcontroller, and a 6502 or z80 is close to the smallest machine on which a self-hosting development environment is feasible
stonethrowaway 2y ago
[flagged]

Bluestein 2y ago

The way you put it, it makes sense.- PS. For many XP was some sort of "sweetspot", as far as Win OSs are concerned.- PS. Then again, it depends. How much evidence of "past-proof"-ness do you need - in terms of "backstory" to meet that requirement? Linux, or - even better - some BSD variants go way further back.-

senorrib 2y ago
Windows has become a garbage pile of spyware lately, but even Linux can't really compare to the insane level of backwards compatibility Windows offers.
- anticorporate 2y ago
  > even Linux can't really compare to the insane level of backwards compatibility Windows offers. My experience is quite the opposite. I still play the Windows Entertainment Pack version of Tetris. In Linux, thanks to Wine, it just works. In Windows 10, I'm told to contact the publisher for a new version.
  - lmm 2y ago
    Emulators tend to be better for compatibility than live systems. Did you try using Wine on windows? And if you take a similar-vintage Linux program, you may well find it runs more easily under SFU or WSL on Windows than on a current version of Linux.
- pmarreck 2y ago
  NixOS can. Because literally every piece of software in the Nix repo includes all dependencies (including things like build dependencies, not just runtime dependencies) that existed at the time it was built, all the way down to the metal basically
  - kragen 2y ago
    well, all the way down to the kernel, not the metal

pushfoo 2y ago

TL;DR: They already wrote Varvara[1] + software[2] for it My understanding is: * The authors wanted to run on a Raspberry Pi powered by solar + batteries * They're often somewhere in the Pacific so their internet connection is often bad * Varvara[1] is the portable-enough solution which works for them * Others liked it enough to write a bunch of other tools[2] It's all pretty much self-hosting at this point. It's not for everyone, but why bother with Windows if it fits your needs? [1]: https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/varvara.html https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/varvara.html [2]: https://github.com/hundredrabbits/awesome-uxn?tab=readme-ov-file#applications https://github.com/hundredrabbits/awesome-uxn?tab=readme-ov-...

anthk 2y ago

They run 9front, much better than XP and 7. No reinstalls, no DLL hells, everything it's statically compiled, updates can be done totally in place and offline. Good luck running Windows 7 on an RPI and with a laughable power draw. Oh, and don't even compare VS + MSDN documentations (huge GB's wasted) vs what Acme can do and just the plan9's 9.intro.pdf book. The disk usage would wear out any SD in days. 9front, otoh, can even selfcompile itself in a breeze. Try that under Windows.

Bluestein 2y ago
The constraints under which they work are wonderful. Power included. It basically mandates excellence, efficiency.-
- anthk 2y ago
  Not just that. For any non-JS web, they can compile and share netsurf offline from 9front and happily post at HN or read lots of sites such as http://68k.news http://68k.news and https://midnight.pub https://midnight.pub And, with a Gemini client for 9front (there are a few), between the gemini 'capsules' (sites and blogs) and gemini://gemi.dev (web decrafying proxy to gemini, where you can read news stripping out the 95% of the pages, scripts, trackers and all the bullshit, they can get totally covered. Gopher9 (Gopher client) makes a good point with gopher://magical.fish for global news, translation services and such. Much less bandwidth spent than the web, for sure. With a bare irc client (again, literally few lines of shell scripting under 9front due how's designed) they can connect to the public IRC servers from bitlbee.org and connect to modern disservices such as Discord and Slack, at least being able to chat against their peers.
- Avshalom 2y ago
  The thing is, while it might mandate efficiency, what they made was an un optimized 8 bit VM synthesizing 16bit arithmetic running on 64 bit hardware. It's not efficient at all, it's just that the constraints they gave themselves leaves enormous amount of power on the table.
  - 2y ago

mephitix 2y ago

I think their philosophy / research is in understanding how to build modern software that is more resilient. So from that research/exploration standpoint it makes sense to me they would go that route instead of using older tech