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Comment by cl3misch | Hacker News Reader

From the screenshot:

> GodotOS is a fake operating system

Is it fake, though? Does the term "operating system" imply the level of hardware it's running on? Otherwise, even if it's running on top of another OS, it's still an OS.

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It's a fake OS in the sense that it's actually an application, not something that can be ran as an operating system like Linux or Windows. I've been a bit careful with my wording when advertising this, I wouldn't want to give the wrong impression.

Would "desktop environment" be a more appropriate description?

Absolutely, but I feel like it's a technical term that might be hard to understand or advertise. When I explained the project to my non-technical friends before showing them, I told them "Ah, it's like an operating system" and they generally understood what I'm going for.

Is it a desktop environment in the Gnome or KDE sense? I didn’t see any third party programs in your trailer video so I guess you can only run your built-in “programs,” right? So I would say it is not really a desktop environment… I’m not sure what the technical definition is, but I must have something to do with acting as an environment to draw other programs.

Calling it a fake OS was, IMO, s great choice for avoiding confusion. Maybe something like Concept-OS or Desktop Environment Mockup could be good names if you want to be fancy.

How hard would it be to include a terminal emulator? You’d get a lot of functionality for free, there!

Desktop Environment is already taken by systems like Gnome and KDE. This is more like a mockup. The “concept car” of desktop environments. It is quite neat.

Yes

Sounds like a shell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_%28computing%29#Graphica...

Is anything that needs a kernel to run also a fake OS? Or drivers/bios/etc.

Is Pharo/SmallTalk/Interlisp a fake OS?

I feel like operating system implies the existence of a kernel

Robot Operating System (ROS) is also an operating system, but it runs on top of computer operating systems like Linux and MacOS, and is focused on supplying the services, build toolchain, and communication standards/paradigms that are useful for implementing a robotics system, much as Linux (and its distros) are focused on providing that for a general computing environment.

In any case, it's clear that the project under discussion here isn't really any of these things is rather a system shell/GUI/launcher. But calling it an "OS" falls under the fun tradition many of us enjoyed in our youth of trying to recreate our own Windows in whatever was our programming platform of choice, and thinking that was what an OS was.

An application that spawns processes/apps/modules, controls them and lets them communicate back to the application for some service is also, in a loose sense, an operating system.

That seems a bit too loose.

Doesn't that apply to IDEs that implement the language server protocol, since they spawn language servers and communicate with them?

And servers like Apache that spawn child processes to handle requests?

Apache supervises tasks in the form of threads and subprocesses, including managing memory in the form of pools, so yes, it's doing some of what an OS would do. It isn't, on the other hand, providing abstractions to hardware, and that's what I think of when I hear "OS". It's not really a cut-and-dried thing though: modern web browsers are like 90% of the way to being full-blown OS's, even down to abstracting hardware in the case of things like WebGPU, but they still rely on a host OS to bridge the connection and do the actual bit-banging required to make it work.

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