Comment by HeckFeck
9 months ago
I fully respect these reasons, they are logical and well said. But hopefully interest in SerenityOS doesn't taper off due to this. Kling was great at garnering interest with his YouTube videos where he'd go deep into bug fixing and feature development.
Certainly, the browser has the most potential and even immediate necessity for the sake of the open Web, but I would still like to daily drive SerenityOS some day. Its aesthetics and holistic architecture are a dream realised.
Windows is going down the toilet fast, and Linux lacks the holistic element, so having something that combines the greatest visual design language - mid to late 90s interface guidelines - with the powerful Unix shell would be a huge boon for desktop computing. (Yes OSX has great albeit modern UX with the Unix underpinnings but isn't OSS or affordable to the masses).
People talk about Linux as if it's a monolithic OS and one team in some OS team sport. It's not. It's a kernel.
We've got lots of OSes built on top of that kernel: ChromeOS, Android, and all the distros that are largely different flavors of a GNU/GPL'ed user space, including Fedora, SteamOS etc.
This is fine. If you want a new OS with a "holistic" user space, well Linux is probably the easiest kernel to build it on, but you can't count on it being as free as the GNU user space, because it's still going to be expensive as hell to build, and whoever does it is going to want to recoup their investment many times over.
I think the chance that the GNU user space ever morphs into a "holistic" consumer operating system is basically zero due to how it's licensed, and the key is to understand that this is both fine and necessary.
If you want some other kind of more consumer friendly user space... I guess that starts with convincing some VCs they can make money off of it. They are not going to fund it out of the kindness of their hearts.
Personally I lost interest in consumer operating systems that are designed to limit freedom for the sake of profit, and became an exclusive Debian/Ubuntu/Mint user long ago. If you can be a programmer you can run these operating systems. The tradeoff is you lose the "holistic" and you gain freedom. The two are fundamentally incompatible I'd say so you have to make your choice.
Haiku?
https://www.haiku-os.org/
Linux (kernel I mean) is good enough. There were some scheduling problems with audio, but it's mostly resolved. The problem is GNU style. We need another GUI and that doesn't mean just replacing X with/or Wayland protocol. It means replacing GTK and QT too.
The penguin kernel is indeed very nifty and boots nearly everywhere. Most importantly it is replete with battle-tested drivers.
Maybe the bold solution would be to port the Serenity userland + UI stack across to Linux and be very staunch about what gets into it. Essentially grafting the Linux kernel in place of the Serenity one, and using its UI Kit and WindowServer instead of GTK/QT/X/Wayland.
Maybe it might even be possible to preserve the logic and non-UI libraries of many applications, even if the UI required a complete rewrite.
A bit fantastical but just putting it out there.
ChromeOS seems very polished under the hood.
It is fast and open source. But very tightly integrated into google and so I doubt, this will ever become a solid base for a new linux desktop.
Chromeos under the hood is just Linux
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That exactyly what PopOS is doing. Cosmic is a new Desktop Envoirment for Wayland written in Rust using a toolkit named Iced.
>There were some scheduling problems with audio, but it's mostly resolved.
It'll be, once the realtime patchset is completely merged.
Meanwhile, some distributions (including Arch) offer a pre-patched kernel.
Isn't that basically ElementaryOS? Or is that not a group up rewrite?
Not really. Pantheon, elementary's desktop environment, is forked from gnome. So in that sense, it's very much a traditional linux desktop distro (not to belittle it, as they have put in a lot of worthwhile work into pantheon & the assorted apps)
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> Windows is going down the toilet fast, and Linux lacks the holistic element, so having something that combines the greatest visual design language - mid to late 90s interface guidelines - with the powerful Unix shell would be a huge boon for desktop computing. (Yes OSX has great albeit modern UX with the Unix underpinnings but isn't OSS or affordable to the masses).
You might want to look at helloSystem.
https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/
Oh yes, a MacOS like design but open with Unix, that would be amazing!
MacOS is only as good as its hardware integration. Lifting and shifting MacOS UX to another system would only be skin deep. Much of the simplicity (and ire to many technical users) of MacOS is because its deep vertical integration.
MacOS is Unix -- a BSD-derived Unix operating system called "Darwin" underlies the user interface.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)
macOS is unix...
And he seems to not want macOS type design. Unless you mean System 8/9.
Modern macOS design is reasonably consistent but with fewer visual cues - still a step above Windows post-7. And yes, I meant the bezels and skeuomorphism of earlier design - exemplified by Windows 9x-2k and System 8/9, while NeXT and IRIX also deserve a shout.
That was the plan for Étoilé but it didn't get traction for some reason.
There are: ravynOS and helloSystem.