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Debian. 1) the customization options (tiling WMs ftw) 2) the ease of replicating the production environment I work with 3) the package managers 4) the every

Debian. 1) the customization options (tiling WMs ftw) 2) the ease of replicating the production environment I work with 3) the package managers 4) the everything-is-an-ascii-stream metaphor and the ease of creating and using tiny, tiny executables (e.g. shell scripts, daemons, composable cli utils, etc) 5) the complete and total freedom to install and use whatever I want, whenever I want without ever having to pay for anything at all, and more importantly ever have to ever think about entering a product key or having to register anything. 6) the tiny, tiny performance requirements and extremely wide hardware support 7) the networking toolage (ssh, curl, wget, scp, rsync, etc being either already there or one apt-get away) 8) the general feeling that complicated things are abstracted away only if it's possible to do so. The fact that things break transparently, or at least more transparently than the competition. The fact that it's beneficial to Debian that failures and shortcomings be discussed publicly and at length rather than being held behind closed doors to maintain a credible commercial image. I would really like it if some OS could re-implement the, as I said, everything-as-an-UTF8-stream w/ networking as a first-class citizen, the blank slate UI to be built from scratch (and a few shells), while shedding the legacy crud of teletype-era in-band signaling keycodes, the X window systems, and so on, which I admit is very, very unlikely as it implies re-implementing almost all of the stack, at once, in a backward-incompatible way, all to re-implement a model (the CLI) that is seen as a technical relic to almost everybody except me and Neal Stephenson. Let's just say, then, that I will switch OS when someone will be offering a consistent, minimal and usable UI metaphor, while accomodating the motor tics I developed using Vim for the last few years.

yzzxy 12y ago
I've been dreaming of a fully rebuilt hacker-friendly OS for a while. Trouble is, it's hard to justify development, even for FOSS, unless you can find some kind of hook for the mainstream, for reasons that may not seem apparent at first. Chief among these concerns: isn't it a little insular to create an OS that will only be used by people with the utility to write their own software? At some point, the software must be developed on the OS it runs on, and most software will be for mainstream users (outside of server-side code). This is theoretically solved by stuff like POSIX, but now we're talking about abandoning those standards in favor of more modern ideas. There is definitely some discussion to be had on the topic of how to build and market a new desktop OS stack in open source. I have a lot of ideas around UI/UX for both hackers and mainstream users, but I'm very conscious of how little I know about system architecture, especially after reading articles by people who have built stuff like Plan9. If people are sufficiently interested, let me know and we can start a listserv or something to bounce around ideas.
- slashnull 12y ago
  Really at this point it's fair to say the the current Linux desktop stack is already a miracle; a backwards-incompatible rebuild is just impossible, or at least with the current state of the mainstream UI development tools. Which, on the other hand, I think is rapidly evolving, now that OOP is out of its hype phase, and can now be evaluated a bit more (pun almost intended) objectively, and freed from its unnecessary parts, and that front-end JS and functional reactive techniques are bringing new ideas and especially terse and powerful notations and abstractions to describe UI layouts and interactions, to the table. One can dream of an invention-of-the-C-language-like situation where a team of lone hackers harness the power of a bump in expressive power to formalize the current state of their UI metaphors and reimplement it from scratch and then build upon that at tremendous (relative) speeds... Well, I dream. Futzing with front-end JS frameworks is having unexpected effects on my worldview, right now.
  - yzzxy 12y ago
    I was just thinking about the battle that would have to be fought to keep JS away from becoming the standard scripting language. JS is a mess - there are people doing great things with it like React, but it's a mess. There's a total lack of design philosophy at the heart of the language, necessitating things like "The Good Parts." I think the main scripting language for an OS should at be considered near-perfect when the OS begins - like C for Unix. One of the design goals for that language should be to work well for graphical UI - imagine if a framework like React had a language designed around it instead of being shoehorned onto JS. We could start talking about ideas like separating the layout, styling, and interactive components in a better balance than that between HTML, CSS, and JS. Really my main point is - There's a conversation to be had around starting from (near) scratch. I think in the end a lot of *nix would have to be incorporated to deal with the realities of hardware and established protocols, but we could also look at starting in a VM and working towards bare metal. Or cave and include POSIX-style standards in a way that is not limiting to desktop OS design.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  "At some point, the software must be developed on the OS it runs on" I'm not sure that's really true, particularly with emulation.
dllthomas 12y ago
Composability, and ease of pulling things between shell and scripts and GUI, are a major win.

yzzxy 12y ago

I've been dreaming of a fully rebuilt hacker-friendly OS for a while. Trouble is, it's hard to justify development, even for FOSS, unless you can find some kind of hook for the mainstream, for reasons that may not seem apparent at first. Chief among these concerns: isn't it a little insular to create an OS that will only be used by people with the utility to write their own software? At some point, the software must be developed on the OS it runs on, and most software will be for mainstream users (outside of server-side code). This is theoretically solved by stuff like POSIX, but now we're talking about abandoning those standards in favor of more modern ideas. There is definitely some discussion to be had on the topic of how to build and market a new desktop OS stack in open source. I have a lot of ideas around UI/UX for both hackers and mainstream users, but I'm very conscious of how little I know about system architecture, especially after reading articles by people who have built stuff like Plan9. If people are sufficiently interested, let me know and we can start a listserv or something to bounce around ideas.

slashnull 12y ago
Really at this point it's fair to say the the current Linux desktop stack is already a miracle; a backwards-incompatible rebuild is just impossible, or at least with the current state of the mainstream UI development tools. Which, on the other hand, I think is rapidly evolving, now that OOP is out of its hype phase, and can now be evaluated a bit more (pun almost intended) objectively, and freed from its unnecessary parts, and that front-end JS and functional reactive techniques are bringing new ideas and especially terse and powerful notations and abstractions to describe UI layouts and interactions, to the table. One can dream of an invention-of-the-C-language-like situation where a team of lone hackers harness the power of a bump in expressive power to formalize the current state of their UI metaphors and reimplement it from scratch and then build upon that at tremendous (relative) speeds... Well, I dream. Futzing with front-end JS frameworks is having unexpected effects on my worldview, right now.
- yzzxy 12y ago
  I was just thinking about the battle that would have to be fought to keep JS away from becoming the standard scripting language. JS is a mess - there are people doing great things with it like React, but it's a mess. There's a total lack of design philosophy at the heart of the language, necessitating things like "The Good Parts." I think the main scripting language for an OS should at be considered near-perfect when the OS begins - like C for Unix. One of the design goals for that language should be to work well for graphical UI - imagine if a framework like React had a language designed around it instead of being shoehorned onto JS. We could start talking about ideas like separating the layout, styling, and interactive components in a better balance than that between HTML, CSS, and JS. Really my main point is - There's a conversation to be had around starting from (near) scratch. I think in the end a lot of *nix would have to be incorporated to deal with the realities of hardware and established protocols, but we could also look at starting in a VM and working towards bare metal. Or cave and include POSIX-style standards in a way that is not limiting to desktop OS design.
dllthomas 12y ago
"At some point, the software must be developed on the OS it runs on" I'm not sure that's really true, particularly with emulation.

dllthomas 12y ago

Composability, and ease of pulling things between shell and scripts and GUI, are a major win.