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Comment by gavanwoolery | Hacker News Reader

One can debate whether or not this is a "true" operating system, but I'd like to coin a (new?) term: "virtual operating system"...not to be confused with emulation or virtual machines, but rather an OS that runs on top of a host OS. One obvious use for such a thing is reskinning an underlying operating system in a non-trivial way, i.e. completely changing the UI paradigms. Another use is allowing programmatic access to virtually everything.

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I would just call this a shell or a runtime environment. It's not an OS and I don't think we should co-opt that term. We don't call nurses virtual surgeons or construction workers virtual architects.

I agree there is probably a better term, but the differentiation would be that you are abstracted one level up from a native shell, and thus could probably more easily write a cross-platform "virtual OS" that could run on top of Windows, OSX, etc - and install it with the ease of running an application, as opposed to fiddling with more sensitive things.

while impressive, this is a userspace program, quite different from an OS, even acounting for their virtual cpu.

nevertheless nice experiment

Robot operating system (ROS) is a bit like this. It sits on top of Linux or OS X but offers a message passing framework and some naming and type conventions for passing around data common in robotics, like transform information, laser scans, odometry, etc.

I think is called "Emacs" ?

Jokes aside, you could probably call this a "desktop environment" and communicate most of the meaning. What remains is either a "virtual machine"[1], "runtime system", or something along those lines.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_machine

So a userspace application with ring0 access, or are you describing paravirtualization or containers?

It could technically fit any of those cases depending on the implementation, but the simplest path is probably building an application that disguises itself as an operating system. It could even be sandboxed to some degree and still probably suit most needs.

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