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Comment by danellis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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

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