WebOS OSE 2.1 | Hacker News Reader

WebOS OSE 2.1

webosose.org

139 pointsprotomyth42 comments

The Palm Pre was one of my favourite phones I’ve ever owned, that awful little plastic feeling keyboard and sharp bottom aside.

WebOS was very well designed, and IMHO only suffered due to underpowered hardware.

I’ve always wanted to do something with it’s leftovers.

I loved my Pre, but I didn't keep it, like you said the hardware wasn't very good. Also at release, while the software was good and showed a lot or promise, it did feel a little beta quality, and that would have been easier to overlook on better hardware. In the end I ended up returning the phone right at the end of my 30 day window and got my first Android phone the Samsung moment. The software was a step down, but at least the hardware was decent and the keyboard wasn't a nightmare to type on. I guess I was used to that paradigm since the phone I had immediately previous was a Nokia E71 and I had blackberrys before that.

Boy I miss that Nokia E71 keyboard.

My mom still misses her E71x to this day, it was such an awesome device.

Likewise. Long live WebOS!

WebOS was great. The whole idea of "cards" iOS and Android blatantly stole from it. But even the TouchPad felt underpowered by the time it came out. It was, as one reviewer at the time put it, "An iPad 1 competitor in an iPad 2 world."

Well, you can say they stole it but Matias Duarte worked on both -- he was a VP for UX and design on WebOS and is now Google's VP of design. (And I don't think he's the only one from Palm to come over to Google, either) Soon after he joined is when Material Design made an appearance.

HP killed Palm in 2012; I suppose that's when Duarte changed jobs and went to Google.

Material Design was released end of 2014.

There were WebOS-like design changes in Android before the adoption of the official material design spec.

My LG OLED television has it and it's such a nice interface overall, together with a wiimote-like controlling device.

If I remember right, the biggest innovation of webOS(other than the at the time especially, amazing card based interface that is so common now) was that its applications at their core were built on web tech (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) with some performance underpinnings to QT

It appears that also lives on!

https://www.webosose.org/docs/guides/development/web-apps/we...

this would have been a very interesting twist of events if this aspect lived on as hardware became more capable especially

I think its safe to say though its going to be relegated to a niche at this point. Though I hope the best for this project

Kind of, Symbian already had the Web Widgets runtime when WebOS came out, so while not having Web at core, the idea of Web apps already existed.

Plus years before that, Microsoft explored the idea with Active Desktop and packaged Web apps.

Great, another OS project that hates screenshots...

This is the OS you see on LG TV's

If I can put this on a Raspberry Pi I may just finally justify building a Raspberry Pi tablet or one of those laptop kits.

According to:

https://www.webosose.org/docs/guides/setup/system-requiremen...

It does look to be very Raspberry Pi friendly!

downstream LuneOS has ports to various devices, including a demo running on Pine64's phone devkit. https://youtu.be/G9lbXE_wWpQ

LuneOS seem dead,the site is gone

They had a release only a month ago:

https://pivotce.com/2019/10/24/luneos-october-stable-release...

Just in case: I've started publishing Sciter.Lite that is HTML/CSS/script UI engine for devices: https://terrainformatica.com/2019/11/20/sciter-and-sciter-li...

One of use case is precisely a WebOS alike UI shell for devices.

I am building it for ARM based devices too: Android, Raspberry and others.

man, this OS had so much potential. HP just panicked on this one and killed it so early

I loved the HP Touchpad, such a waste...

I bought it during the fire sale and my mom used it for a number of years till all support for it was taken away. It was perfect at that price

Actually the CEO who was pushing for it turned out to be sexually harassing at least one of his employees and got fired

And why is this relevant?

You don’t see a possible correlation between a product being killed and its primary advocate being fired in disgrace?

Does anyone know if this has BeOS DNA (since Palm bought out BeInc)?

No, different PalmOS lineage.

Can we use this to replace android on android based smartphone?

Does anyone know how different this is from the version used by LG for their TVs?

I'd love my TV to not run their goddamn spyware, to not autoinstall apps, to not run spam "Channel Plus" notifications.

Hear, hear! I've never given my LG television any identifying information so it doesn't allow me to use any apps other than those that were installed when purchased. Which is fine but I hate getting notifications about channels they've added or removed. It should just display video as far as I'm concerned. I'd love to be able to sideload other apps without going through the LG store and giving them data.

I’m not home so I can’t provide the magic list, but for those who are OK with a smart TV if it doesn’t track you: if you have a Pi-Hole or otherwise block a bunch of LG domains you can access the whole app ecosystem without the ads and the crap. You can find the list here and there online.

The YouTube app is remarkably good.

This would be great. However, these massive problems aside, the LG webOS on TVs is by an absolute mile the best software I have ever encountered on a consumer electronics product. It completely blows away anything else.

I've honestly never seen WebOS beyond the settings screen on my LG B7. During the initial setup it prompted me to create an LG account which I of course denied. It never bothered me since.

I was also pleasantly surprised to see that all data collection/cookie stuff was set to off by default.

The netflix app is very good. I was stunned to see the Disney+ app at 5Mb. So webOS apps have merrit.

You can still buy dumb TVs, and a highly recommend it. For example, LG has a (hard to find) "commercial lite" line; my 55" 4k dumb TV works great.

US: https://www.lg.com/us/business/hospitality-tvs/commercial-li...

Canada: https://www.lg.com/ca_en/commercial-lite

What’s the fundamental difference between a dumb TV and a smart one that’s never configured to connect to WiFi?

Simplicity. Even without internet a smart TV has a certain amount of baggage (tonnes of menus and applications that require connectivity).

No need for updates for buggy firmware.

It's confusing. I tried to find out who is behind it now and on what platforms it runs, and this is from the About page:

"webOS is a web-centric and usability-focused software platform for smart devices, which has proven its performance and stability in over 70 million LG Smart TVs. ...

The open source project of webOS, called webOS Open Source Edition (OSE), was announced in March 2018 under the philosophy of open platform, open partnership, and open connectivity"

The FAQ however claims:

Officially, webOS OSE 1.x and 2.0 only supports Raspberry Pi 3 and 4, respectively. However, as webOS OSE is an open source project, it is your call to decide whether to implement webOS OSE on any other form factors.

Also there is "Tier 3 support" for ROS 2, the robotic operating system, whatever that means.

It supports developing applications in C/C++ with Qt but also enactJs which is based on React.

To sack it may have been one of the stupidest decisions ever by a CEO (Apotheker).

After the blow out sale they had something they were lacking before: huge customer base. But the idea to make money with software and apps instead of hardware may not have been compatible with HP business culture.

Not sure if the HP Veer is supported (it had original webOS), but it was certainly the smallest smartphone I've ever used. Though the keyboard was hilariously cramped it represented a curious and strangely enticing challenge!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r34-89BtmQA

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