MercuryOS – A speculative reimagining of current operating system paradigms
mercuryos.com
mercuryos.com
The UI in my car's entertainment system is not part of the QNX operating system that runs the devices (and talks to the main instrument panel to tell things like the current speed limit or the song that just started to play).
This is good UI/UX work, but it's a workflow app, a personal information manager and it really doesn't (or shouldn't) care too much about the unseen software and hardware that's supporting it - that's precisely the job of the OS.
All major desktop OSes that people actually miss, have had a full stack experience for users and developers alike.
That's because the GUI is not a part of the OS. The GUI is not an integral part of macOS - it's just that Apple sells one bundled, the same way that Canonical and Red Hat bundle Gnome. We had a number of other OSs that made a similar decision, on Lisp machines, Smalltalk workstations, Apollo's DomainOS, and a couple others I can't remember. None of these survived to this day.
Including macOS and NeXT, their POSIX layer is only meant to bring stuff into the platform, not to ever let it out again.
There is nothing of UNIX on Objective-C nor Swift.
Additionally, iOS only supports a subset of UNIX.
Finally it is impossible to ship an iOS application only using the POSIX subset exposed in OS.
How many iOS apps have your ever shipped?
Of course. It only needs what the applications supposed to run on it need. The same is true about my car entertainment system - it probably doesn't have many tty's and doesn't really need more than one filesystem. Same, BTW, applies to Android - it's a Linux, but it's not really a desktop OS.
> How many iOS apps have your ever shipped?
Does it have any relevance to knowing the difference between an OS and a GUI?