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Node OS
- cdnsteve 12y agoThis link seems to have detail than the homepage. https://github.com/NodeOS/NodeOS-Docker#introduction https://github.com/NodeOS/NodeOS-Docker#introduction
- CoffeeDregs 12y agoNot to say that the project doesn't look valuable, but I'm not sure if the project is still alive. See: https://github.com/NodeOS https://github.com/NodeOS Latest commit was 4 months ago.
- jackmoore 12y agoI thought the same thing, then noticed the only files in the repository are the readme and info for contributing. I'm not sure where the actual project source is.
- centizen 12y agoIt's here: https://github.com/NodeOS/NodeOS-Docker https://github.com/NodeOS/NodeOS-Docker EDIT: Nevermind, seems this is all meta and dockerfiles.
- nmjohn 12y agoIt appears they are just using the github repo for the issue tracker. The issue tracker was quite active until the middle of july, at which point it just stopped. I'm not sure if they moved platforms or abandoned the project. In either case it doesn't look like they were quite ready for public appearances!
- dragonwriter 12y agoGiven that the NodeOS homepage linked to the thread title lists as one of the few bits of information about NodeOS that it is "hosted on Github / open and easy to contribute to - pull request friendly", I think the fact that none of the projects at https://github.com/NodeOS https://github.com/NodeOS have been updated since May is a likely sign that the effort is dead.
- mappu 12y agoA similar project in perl: http://perllinux.sourceforge.net/ http://perllinux.sourceforge.net/ (2005)
- andrewstuart2 12y agoI think calling it an OS might be a stretch. "Linux distribution" is perhaps a little more accurate.
- beachstartup 12y agoi think it's standard practice to call a linux distro an OS. centos does it, so does debian ("the universal operating system"), and more recently, coreos.
- agwa 12y agoThe most obvious example of why Debian is an OS, not a "Linux distro," is because you can install the kfreebsd architecture and then you're not using Linux at all.
- beachstartup 12y agoright, but - is a linux distribution not an operating system? ever?
- dragonwriter 12y agoA Linux distribution is an OS. Its an OS that shares considerable code and features with other related OS's, but that's true, e.g., of say "Windows" with respect to "Windows Server", which I think most people would agree are, in fact, OS's.
- awalton 12y agoHonestly, it might be time to put the pejorative term "Linux distribution" to death. It was pretty true when there was Slackware and Debian, but the we're not talking about two stalks off of the same evolutionary branch anymore, but an entire ecosystem of different animals. Modern "distributions" ship with vastly different libcs (bionic, newer vs older glibc, muslc), different userland runtimes (busybox, "GNU/Linux" with core utils, etc), different compilers (various branches of gcc, llvm increasingly), different init systems (SysV, upstart, systemd, etc), different security frameworks (AppArmor, SELinux), different display servers (X, Wayland, unfortunately Mir and SurfaceFlinger) and vastly different UIs (from Android, to GNOME and its fragmentations, to KDE and its fragmentations, LXDE and XFCE, and so forth). You can't even bet on the file system hierarchy being the same anymore, with aberrations like NixOS running around. The saddest part is that Linux is the most some of these operating systems have in common, and these days it can easily have the least overall impact on most of the users. These things are completely different animals, loosely bound by design contracts like FreeDesktop.org's various specs and Linux Standard Base specs which everyone violates in new and unique ways. Not treating these operating systems as entirely different entities is being at best dishonest, and at worst is costing millions, perhaps even hundreds of millions of dollars in effort across the industry. You can't honestly target "Linux" as a platform because it's not a platform. If you've maintained, or especially if you've distributed any piece of software on "Linux" these days, you've seen the horrors.
- dubcanada 12y agoReminds me of https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
- codereflection 12y agonpm frustrates me to no end, so my knee jerk reaction to this is "No!" Interesting idea though. However it's not an OS, it's using NPM as the OS's package manager. http://node-os.com/blog/introduction/ http://node-os.com/blog/introduction/
- Vekz 12y agoNice blanket negative statement "NPM IS BAD". Maybe you'd consider expanding on why npm frustrates you? and leaving a comment with more value.
- Pacabel 12y agoI don't see why codereflection needs to spell it out. The problems with npm, and JavaScript in general, are quite apparent to anyone who has used them. And if you haven't used them, a quick search engine search will turn up this information many times over. It'd make sense to ask for such clarification if the information truly wasn't available elsewhere, and accessible with a quick search. But that's obviously not the case. It's pointless to rehash this obvious stuff over and over and over and over again.
- bshimmin 12y agoIt'd be good if there were a canonical "Why npm sucks" article, like the "fractal of bad design" one for PHP. This one seems like a fairly reasonable candidate: http://www.jongleberry.com/why-i-hate-npm.html http://www.jongleberry.com/why-i-hate-npm.html (though the "nested dependencies" bit needs much more swearing, and I disagree with the last paragraph suggesting things in Ruby and Python land are just as bad).
- evanriley 12y agoIn the last paragraph there, is he saying that Golang is 'bad' because it doesn't have a package manager? Does it need one? I always assumed 'go get' was enough. Honestly curious here.
- 12y ago
- xiaoma 12y agoAtwood's law continues.
- imslavko 12y agoFirst submission of this link a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6519671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6519671
- dhaivatpandya 12y agoAs a concept, I guess this can be called an OS, but at the present moment, it is pretty far from one. Right now it seems like this is basically a work-in-progress replica of BusyBox built on Node.
- Pacabel 12y agoWhat benefit does this approach bring? It reminds me of Chrome OS and Firefox OS. These all are based upon the Linux kernel, so they could potentially offer a very rich user experience like so many more traditional Linux distributions do. Yet they intentionally cripple themselves into being limited, JavaScript-only platforms. This would be understandable if, say, storage space was expensive, like it was in the 1980s, and the software had to be kept lean and limited. But that's clearly not the case today, even when it comes to low-end smartphones. The same goes for runtime performance. It'd be one thing if software written in JavaScript was consistently and significantly faster than software written in C, C++, and other commonly used languages. But that just isn't the case. Unless we're looking at highly tuned and highly unrealistic benchmarks that even the JavaScript VM authors have focused on making run fast, JavaScript's performance is quite bad. It would be understandable if perhaps the user experience could be improved in some way by them providing superior alternatives to the traditional userland software offered by Linux distributions. Yet this isn't the case, either, because some of the biggest complaints with Chrome OS and Firefox OS are that the bundled software is awful, and users have no real recourse due to the very limited environment that both offer. As far as I can tell, users just can't win with a system like this. The kernel is powerful, but this power is isolated and kept inaccessible. The userland experience is much worse than what one would get if just using a traditional Linux distro, and running the JavaScript software on top of that. The benefit to the user just isn't apparent.
- Havvy 12y agoWell, with FirefoxOS, you don't have Android's Dalvik nonesense nor iOS's restrictive marketplace. They needed some userland language, since the isolation keeps security high. These mobile computers aren't used in a security conscious way, and many developers are unscrupulous in the environments. Give them the power to install rootkits, and they will.
- varkson 12y agoI'm generally pretty open about using web technology outside the web, but come on guys, why do we need this?
- mmahemoff 12y agoNo doubt JavaScript's past, present, and future is intertwined with the web, but really it's an independent programming language. It's not like there are primitives for divs and tables. And by an accident of history, it also happens to be the world's most popular programming language and overall a decent scripting language, so I can't see why its web association should make it any less OS-ready than any other language. Plus, Node's async model lends itself implementing lower-level OS features (not that they are present so far in NodeOS).
- CmonDev 12y agoWe are forced to use poorly-designed legacy languages on the "open" web, but why would you torment yourself with them when you are not limited outside of the "open" web?
- xj9 12y agoHow is this useful exactly? I suppose there are JS bindings for GNOME (if I remember correctly) so getting a GUI stack wouldn't be that difficult, if that's where they want to go. I just don't see how using NodeOS would be an advantage over any other *NIX distro.
- naturalethic 12y agoIt isn't useful at all. It is an experiment and a hobby. For those of us who use javascript everywhere we already can, it is natural to want to push it further and see what we come up with.
- sauere 12y agoOperating Systems written in JavaScript, Webframeworks written in C. It sure is a strange world we live in.
- oscargrouch 12y agonah.. its still Linux.. much like Android or Firefox OS
- rkda 12y agoWonder why you're downvoted. I think your point is valid.
- sarciszewski 12y agoYeah... Anyone who makes a valid point or say something possibly humorous gets downvoted by overly sensitive HN readers. (Like this comment inevitably will, too.)
- sarciszewski 12y ago(I wonder how many people downvoted it because they disliked what I said, and how many downvoted it as a proof of concept?)
- andrewflnr 12y agoIt was downvoted because it was manifestly false and destructive.
- sarciszewski 12y agoDestructive? In a literary sense, or in a "10 tons of TNT" sense? I'm no literary critic if that's what you're implying.
- 12y ago
- vanilla 12y agonpm gives you dependency hell in a medium sized project, with a node_modules folder 10 times larger than the project. This on a OS level ... interesting
- mrmondo 12y agoThat is disgusting, it's not even native (not that you'd want it to be), not to mention that NPM is the most unreliable package manager out there.
- smellf 12y agoDon't you love it when people try to improve on things that they don't understand?
- gnarbarian 12y agoLike most legislation!
- arms 12y agoWhy do you think NPM is "the most unreliable package manager"? I don't use Node, but I thought the general consensus was that it's one of the best out there. I'm genuinely curious.
- stormbeta 12y agoNo offense, but where on earth did you get that impression from? I have a feeling whoever told you that has either never used npm with a non-trivial project or was messing with you. I've had more issues with npm in the last month than I've had with pip, gem, and apt combined over the last two years. "most unreliable package manager" is an apt descriptor.
- fletchowns 12y agoIs the issue just that npmjs.org is frequently unavailable? Surely any serious project will have their own mirror of NPM, PyPI, apt, yum, etc so they are not relying on third party servers they don't control to be able to do a build/deploy/whatever.
- shayanjm 12y agoIf you've used it for anything non-trivial, then you probably should've been using a private registry - in which case you get the decentralized benefits of npm sans npmjs.org availability issues. source: a number of non-trivial node deploys
- Havvy 12y agoThe main benefit they're giving is that you can use `npm` instead of `yum` or `aur` or whatever the package manager you use is. IMO, you're better off using Nix if you are tired of your package manager.
- spankalee 12y agoI was hoping that this would be about a unikernel for node.js, ala MirageOs, which would be quite interesting for running node directly on VMs, Xen, Raspberry Pi, and such.
- Touche 12y agoThe main repo hasn't been updated since February: https://github.com/NodeOS/NodeOS-Docker https://github.com/NodeOS/NodeOS-Docker
- yebyen 12y agoThis is not necessarily a bad thing, right? I've written Dockerfiles before that don't need updating and are useful months later
- Touche 12y agoIs your dockerfile an OS?
- yebyen 12y agoYes? Sort of .. is your distribution an OS? (Should the distro's source repo change every time the installer is rebuilt from new upstream packages? I don't think so) Someone has been working on this repo for the last 22 days and they merged their changes back in #12. Possibly in response to allegations that the Node-OS project is dead. I would expect most of the active development to be in the upstreams of this project (npm, linux kernel), it doesn't seem to be dead at any rate. Just not very fast-paced or popular.
- sarciszewski 12y agoI haven't dabbled in Node yet; my main source of hesitation was I've been told npm doesn't cryptographically sign packages. If npm as a package manager is a selling point, I would hope this has been corrected (or had been all along). Otherwise, enjoy your MITM trojans.
- wcummings 12y agoSo then you can't host a mirror?
- sarciszewski 12y agoSure. But if anyone wanted to use your mirror, how would they know you didn't make changes to the base package without crypto? :)
- noobermin 12y agoI am an outsider who is starting to touch javascript but I have my history in scripting and numerical sims. Is all this stuff about node.js really something revolutionary or is it hype?
- sarciszewski 12y agoMy experience with node-webkit leads me to believe it could, once ironed out, actually become a popular way for web developers to get their start with client-side apps. As far as Node.js as a server-side scripting language? Idk. I'm a PHP guy.
- totoroisalive 12y agoThe npm / node bubble has begun.
- naviehuynh 12y agowhat is the purpose of this OS anyway?
- lorddoig 12y ago> 83 points by dhruvarora013 4 hours ago I'm guessing there's a hundred neckbeards on 4chan who've been laughing hysterically for ~3.5 hours
- hartator 12y agowhy would be they laughing? It's a hoax?
- freakonom 12y agonpm as your package manager: npm install -g node as your shell: node An actual minimalist kernel booting to node might be interesting. But this isn't that. This just looks like plain node and npm, except locked down and made complicated for no reason.
- mattdeboard 12y agoNo.