"LoseThos" 64-bit Open Source OS: For Programming as Entertainment | Hacker News Reader

"LoseThos" 64-bit Open Source OS: For Programming as Entertainment

losethos.com

33 pointssutro11 comments

It's a fascinating project, but if you made a game in LoseThos, who would actually install the OS / boot via LiveCD to play it?

Still, it's nice to see someone trying to preserve the experience of early home computing; barebones systems with painfully easy access to graphics hardware.

Hopefully he or someone else can improve upon this and make an OS which includes some modern amenities (ahem, network support for multiplayer!) and we'd have what is sort of like an open source console OS, a non-moving software target which could be paired with a non-moving hardware target and bring some of the advantages of console development to the PC. This pairing could even be in the form of a through-and-through open source video game console.

In a VM scenario, it could be an interesting environment to do some development in. The limitations and OS install aren't a big deal if it lived in a VM window, and the thing is small.

I've been wondering in general if we will get to the "each app in a VM window" paradigm as a common way to do business on the desktop. Really if there was a cross-vm cut and paste and filesystem driver, the os itself would be a smaller part of the picture.

However, the easy access to graphics hardware is less appealing when you realize it only supports 640x480 and 16 colors. Yes, you could write directly to ports to change the screen mode, but that would break the "non-moving target" argument.

Best Part: "The LoseThos operating system will be free, but I might sell applications or support, or possibly do adware" :)

Ask not why it boots in 2 seconds, ask what the heck other operating systems are doing.

I think I found a new friend. :)

Sounds entertaining. I'll give the developer credit: he/she knows what he wants from that project, and that's half the battle. No feature creep in his mind.

This is a fascinating project.

it better not have any internet/lan support ever... "runs everything in kernel mode and all applications have access to everything".. If I was a virus-programmer, my fingers would itch...

Am I crazy or is this a great way to figure out if your bug is in the hardware or the OS?

Tell me I'm crazy and no one else is thinking of doing actual work with this.

Gloriously impractical.

this is totally crazy!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com