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Comment by danellis | Hacker News Reader

"the mission to reinvigorate the RISC OS market"

They're nearly 20 years too late for that. The only compelling reason to use RISC OS over anything else these days is nostalgia. Still, it might be an interesting project to hack on.

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I don't know about that. There's a serious market for a real desktop personal computing operating system right now, one that is simple (note: not easy, simple), and enables users instead of trying to coddle them. Could RISC OS fill that role? Probably not without a whole lot of changes, starting with a conversion to preemptive multitasking. And worse, if anyone took it up they'd probably make it all POSIX and integrate a package manager and try to turn it into another Linux Distro.

Still, I can hold on to vain hopes.

I think simple and useful are competing goals. RISC OS is simple, but there's a lot that it can't do. I expect that simplicity makes porting larger software projects pretty difficult too.

> starting with a conversion to preemptive multitasking

I wonder how difficult that would actually be. I think it could be done without changing the existing WIMP API. The Wimp_Poll loop would still exist as is, just as in other windowing systems; it just wouldn't be the only time it loses control.

And preemption has certainly been done before in Niall Douglas's Tornado project.

> I think simple and useful are competing goals.

Counterpoint: the stick, the knife, and the wheel.

How often do you use a single stick or wheel, that isn't part of some much more complicated machine?

(I won't argue about the knife. That is both simple and useful)

That doesn't seem like a counterpoint at all. For example, a knife would be more useful if you could also eat soup with it, but it would be less useful.

Why would I want to eat soup with a knife? That sounds like it would cause more problems than it solves. A knife you can eat soup with is exactly the kind of over-engineered nonsense feature that modern OSs cram in. But I could carve a spoon with a knife.

Let me give a less analogous example: Windows recently (or will soon, I forget) have a Dark Mode, which will make window colors darker and text colors brighter. This is a feature upgrade, apparently. Yet back in Windows 95 people would have laughed at you for making a big deal out of that, because you could just arbitrarily change all the window and text colors at will. No reghacks, no CSS, just a simple settings widget [0].

Another example is how ludicrous application installation has become. In the DOS and MacOS Classic days you just copied a folder to a disk, any disk, and ran it and it worked. Nowadays there's package managers and SxS and you can't even install applications to different disks. Is the former method more limited? In some ways yes. But it is also much more flexible in others and much simpler, it's easy to reason about and fits perfectly with the file management metaphor that is the core abstraction of desktop OSs.

[0]http://toastytech.com/guis/win95schemes.png

> There's a serious market…

The personal computing market has already been divided between Windows, MacOS, and ChromeOS.

I had a look at the Icon Bar site [1], and I'm amazed that people are still able to sell software for RISC OS.

I was given an informal (but firm) takedown notice in about 2002, when I uploaded an old game to my website and linked to it from a RISC OS forum. I'd thought RISC OS was dead then.

[1] https://www.iconbar.com/

Running RPCEmu, I was surprised how real the nostalgia for old operating systems can feel!

( and I still haven't gotten Digital Symphony to work on any kind of modern machine. :-/ )

I converted a lot of my music from SoundTrackers to Digital Symphony files because it had compression, so I needed half as many floppies. Now, with nothing to play them on, I regret that.

That's terrible to hear! Perhaps you'll find some of them back here: https://modarchive.org/index.php?faq-torrents

Also, xmp will play symphony files, http://xmp.sourceforge.net/

(installs fine on debian with apt install xmp )

If you just want to listen to your mod collection again, that might be sufficient already! :-)

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