Ask HN: Has anyone considered forking TempleOS and making a modern OS out of it? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Has anyone considered forking TempleOS and making a modern OS out of it?

20 pointstombert14 comments

I've been looking through the source code for TempleOS and playing with it in a VM for awhile now.

I know that Terry Davis has his vision where he feels that it has to be 640x480 and non-networked because God or something told him that was the best, but I was curious the amount of work that would be required to add a few more modern OS. I think that if it had networking and a few other features here and there, it might be a genuinely usable OS.

So that's my question: Has anyone here considered forking the code and trying to make something useful for modern applications?

View on HN

Part of what makes TempleOS so powerful with so little code is that everything fits together, so you can make a lot of assumptions. I don't know the details, but I bet there are lots of design choices that work well, or are able to implement concisely specifically because of the resolution assumption.

Really tightly integrated designs eventually get to the point where there's almost nothing to change... No word could be swapped, no color could be different, because the each design choice relies on the last. Many designers use that as a measure of when something is ready. When you really apply iterative design practices, you add and take away and add and take away, and you eventually end up with an extremely lightweight design that is very strong, but where every piece of the whole is extremely important. Apple strives for this.

I'm not saying TempleOS is there, but that's the kind of design project it is, and that's where it's headed. That's what makes it "holy"... It's not perfect but it's pointed at perfection and it aims to get there. Linus, in contrast, doesn't care if Linux is perfect. He wants to make something that's useful and is willing to make a mess if it helps people get their work done.

My counter question is why would you want to?

TempleOS was created with specific goals in mind and is a fun neat oddity because of it. What is there to gain by adding networking and modernizing it in other ways?

In my opinion TempleOS is like knowing about that weird thing in your home town that only people who grew up there know about. No one knows why it exists but it does. Trying to modify it to make it more modern and get more eyes on it just feels like it goes against the idea of what it is.

There's this:https://github.com/minexew/Shrine

https://github.com/minexew/Shrine/issues/2

What the hell is with those comments?

It is a play on the seemingly random sentences Terry (the creator - or rather the prophet - of TempleOS) would include on his comments.

I thought he changed his mind recently about the usefulness of networking. God likes new desciples talking to each other via TCP and UDP sockets.

Joke discussion here: https://github.com/minexew/Shrine/issues/2

He only forbids gore, i.e. multimedia, memory fragmentation with overly big files >100000 lines.

No! You don't get to fork his work and "improve upon it" by pissing all over it. Have some respect!

Hello, Terry!

I'm going to assume this is Terry or a troll, though I'll respond with the presumption of Terry will read it.

TempleOS is public domain, so I'm well within my legal right to fork it if I'd like. Respect isn't even part of it; anything in the public domain is up for grabs by anyone.

I don't feel that adding basic TCP and UDP support would be "pissing all over it"; even the Commodore 64 eventually got basic networking.

As someone who made his own OS, i feel like this would be an exercise in futility.

Making one is a good learning experience, but you can't keep up with the world completely on your own.

So for it to be worth working on, there should be a non-negligible user and developer base for it.

Why Temple OS?

Like... as a hobby project?

Well, starting out, at least. TempleOS has enough legitimately interesting ideas that I think could make a genuinely interesting modern OS if given the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com