Comment on This Alternative Operating System Is Keeping Retro Computing Alive
Eldritch@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Not going to admonish the devs for doing what they like in their own time. There are a lot of hobby OS out there and they are fun to tinker around with for a few minutes.
And this is likely my own personal nitpick. But honestly rather than starting something new I would really like to see someone adopt and modernize something like Plan 9 or Inferno. A few years ago there was a group trying to do a more modern user-centered version of plan 9. Complete with a lot of the more modern apps that users would want to use on such a system. I think once they saw the actual scope that the project would require, it kind of silently sputtered out to the best of my knowledge. Those operating systems were so ahead of their time. Linux is only just now catching up in some ways.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 4 days ago
9front? I thought that was still pretty active with new releases steadily coming out.
Eldritch@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Nah, the front fell off. Yes they are still kicking. But they are more just maintaining plan 9 largely as it existed.
I think it was harvey? They planned to do things a little more sacrilegious. Offering desktop environments other than Rio out of the box. Bringing over compiles for Firefox Etc. And providing a simple easy to use installer like many Linux distributions these days. Sort of like the Ubuntu of Plan 9.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 4 days ago
Yeah, makes sense. I think they sort of just missed the boat :-(. I mean, the research that went into it birthed UTF-8, /proc and /sys, a lot of really good things that managed to make it in super-watered-down form into modern operating systems. But I think that if you want to make a modern OS that gets any kind of traction today, it needs to live on the web as opposed to on someone’s personal computer, sad to say.
I think if you wanted to get serious about bringing those ideas into the modern day you would need to just rewrite it from scratch within a different context with a different scope.
Eldritch@lemmy.world 4 days ago
That’s literally the niche inferno and plan were designed for. Plan was designed so that local and remote were abstracted away. Everything was just a data stream. You could run inferno literally in a browser. Which you don’t get much more in the web than that lol.
Specifically inferno is what android sort of half was. Android traditionally heavily leveraged java/dalvik bytecode for apps. But the root system was native. The bytecode ran on top of that. Inferno pushed the bytecode all the way to the micro kernel.
I still install other os like all these regularly. The thing that has kept me from keeping them. Is lack of a few basic things like modern web browsers. I hear haiku is making progress in that front at least. I have fond memories of running Be on an old Pentium II.