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Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

Here is another thought. One has to realize that nobody wants an operating system. People only use them because it is the only way to run the applications the users actually wants to use. If you could run an office suite, a browser and a mail client without Windows or Linux, that is what people would do. At best an operating system is absolutely invisible, realistically it causes additional pains over those inflicted by the applications. I can not really imagine how this could work, but a new non-OS would probably be a better idea than a new OS.

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Application management, window management, resource management, document management, etc. OSs are more than just the applications they run, they provide the user ways to manage their workflow.

On the other hand, you know what OS was practically invisible? DOS. And DOS was pretty great, so maybe you're on to something.

MS-DOS wasn't that great. Oh, don't get me wrong, it's great at being a singer user, non-reentrant interrupt handler on a painful to program architecture [1]. A lot of applications skipped using device drivers entirely for things like the keyboard, video and serial I/O (using such made the program run more slowly).

Do you know how much work it was to redirect the input/output of an MS-DOS application? It can get pretty insane [2].

[1] You had to pick a memory model to compile against for one thing---tiny, small, medium, compact, large or huge. You had to deal with FAR and NEAR pointers, and it really drove home the point that sizeof(int) != sizeof(long) != sizeof(void *) when writing C on that system.

[2] http://boston.conman.org/2015/12/13.1 More info here: https://github.com/spc476/NaNoGenMo-2015

I wrote a fair number of DOS programs. The memory models wern't that bad, at least you had choices... I also wrote code on machines that had 64k address spaces, with soft banking. That was worse... What I remember being a huge PITA was memory management on macOS in the system 5/6 time-frame. I vaguly have memories of struggling with locking/unlocking handles.. Heck googling about it, turns up a whole wikipedia article which spends a bit of time describing it in general.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_memory_management

Anyway, in dos, .ost little utilities and such worked just fine in tiny (and you could use .com which simplified everything even more). Medium and compact were sort pointless because if you were writing anything you expected to grow beyond 64k then you used a HLL and let the compiler deal with most of the fiddly stuff. IIRC One of the compilers (may have been turboC) had an project/link option which let you cycles through all the memory models, and with a quick rebuild you could check executable sizes or run little benchmarks. I did a fair amount of programming in Turbo Pascal, and I just checked the manual, it basically hid the entire memory model argument, even going so far as to have that "overlay" functionality which was basically a software paging unit for your program which would load groups of methods from disk as necessary.

Yah, and I wrote TSR's too... and hacks to take over bios/dos INT calls, etc etc etc. These days it seems any software project that has been around for a few years is orders of magnitude more difficult than the stuff people claim was hard about DOS. Heck there are _network_ drivers in linux that are orders of magnitude more code (and more complex) than DOS or probably the vast majority of DOS applications. People simply didn't write 100 million line DOS programs so dealing with little hardware oddities is simple vs trying to ferret out VM barrier bugs in linux (or whatever).

All of those things can be done by applications and services. You’re just listening the kinds of applications and services OSes tend to bundle in order to bootstrap an application and service market.

> Here is another thought. One has to realize that nobody wants an operating system. People only use them because it is the only way to run the applications the users actually wants to use.

That reduces things to almost an absurd level, and literally tries to ignore reality.

---

I want X!

Ok, we need this and that to get there...

I don't want this and that, I want X!

But you need this and that to get to X...

I don't want this and that, I want X!

---

While it's true in essence, and people should always keep the end user and lofty end goals in mind, we should never lose sight of the ground, because that's where we exist.

Besides, different users want their operating system to do different things.

> At best an operating system is absolutely invisible ... but a new non-OS would probably be a better idea than a new OS.

This train of thought can be applied to just about anything. The best product for X would just get out of the way, and assist you seamlessly to do X.

It’s not absurd. If you want Y to get X and you would be perfectly happy to get X without Y then you don’t really want Y.

Linux works exactly like this. Most people who use Linux never directly interact with the kernel. They interact with applications.

The graphical shell is an application - KDE(plasmashell) Gnome(gnome-shell) etc. the console shell is an application - bash,zsh,fish etc. The WM is an application - (KWin, Mutter, i3, xmonad etc.) The file manager is an application - (nautilus,dolphin,ranger, etc.) The package manager is an application - (apt,portage,pacman,nix etc.)

You can choose not use any one of these(or replace them with alternatives). They exist because they do something essential - and the kernel exists because it provides them with a coherent view of the users computer. It is their interface with the hardware.

You miss the point, people wants to use vim not the gnome shell.

And there is nothing stopping you from doing that - just don't start gnome shell or X on startup, and type vim on the tty.

I think you've hit the nail on the head here. I would even take this thought further and say people want the features of the apps - but not necessarily segregated into distinct apps. Consider how poor the composition of various apps is today. The prevalent conception of 'operating system' and what it should provide can only result in another plethora of silo-ed apps. We need some major whole-system redesign.

If you're interested in operating systems along these lines, I'd recommend checking out Haiku OS. The OS provides a series of "kits" that form the basic building blocks of different types of application.

https://www.haiku-os.org/

Yeah Haiku is definitely interesting and I'll take another look. I think the datatypes concept (originally from AmigaOS, and I assume also in Haiku?) is very powerful and mainstream operating systems haven't caught up yet. I am also interesting in questioning some core ideas such as file systems and processes (do we need them?), binary compilation and binding (can we maximize work in higher level language?) etc.

Easy, that is how we used to program in the old days on systems where the language runtime was the OS.

Hard Disagree. I am glad Android has GCM so that every application isn't draining my battery maintaining a separate notification channel. I'm glad Android provides a Share facility so that I can easily send deep links to people and the mobile community didn't need to invent and evangelize some IPC based system for achieving this. I'm glad Android provides Accessibility Services. I'm glad Android provides a pluggable keyboard system so that apps don't need to implement their own. Etc.

OSs are not perfect, and they are facing headwinds (as well as some tailwinds like power constraints) but pretending they don't provide any benefits is just not thinking hard enough.

I'd just go with ChromeOS.

That is correct. You build the operating system that can woo the kind of developers who you want to do business with.

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