is SeL4 anywhere near usability by regular humans? is that even it's design purpose? Are we going to see the equivalent of Arch Sel4 that I can install, run wayland to get a gui, and replace my linux stuff?
But today, they have native modern webbrowser with native 3d acceleration and native audio.
Genode has gone very far.
It is not. The closest thing you'll get to it that has the features you mention, is Qubes OS [0].
When it comes to the L4 family, Google's adoption of seL4 [1] might be interesting to you, and possibly L4Re [2] [3], which is open source (not their tooling, though) with commercial support.
Edit: there's a bunch more open source activity in this field, but I'm not familiar with it.
[1] https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/10/announcing-kataos-...
> Sparrow is a project to build a low-power secure embeded platform for Ambient ML applications. The target platform leverages RISC-V and OpenTitan. The Sparrow software includes a home-grown operating system named CantripOS, that runs on top of seL4 and (ignoring the seL4 kernel) is written almost entirely in Rust.
> Archived on Jan 4 2024
Look into Makatea[0], a seL4-based QubesOS-like system.
That doesn't mean any project to do that will have the fate of Hurd. But it is a huge and complicated task.
By setting up an open system on top of a permissions bound system (Unix) having limitations as an user looks really weird and with full of rough edges everywhere, with limited permissions even to mount a hard disk image. Namespaces in Hurd (+ maybe guix) solve that by giving the user lots of freedom to install and share whatever it wants without breaking a system.
TBF, that makes it quite explicit that the problem of Hurd never getting ready was due to the project governance (as in "this is not a goal"). A project that uses Mach could never get big.
I'd be really happy if I could easily deploy small self-contained embedded applications using general purpose ARMv8 processors. Like one would do with an infotainment system for a car, which is currently done primarily with QNX.
Like if there was a clear order of usability between Linux and MacOS :) it's more a matter of habits and preferences (and religion maybe for some ^^) than anything else.
But we can say this: there's nothing intuitive about Windows' incomplete transition to the new settings app that still sometimes requires you to jump to the old control panel system; there's nothing intuitive about Linux' 50 desktop environments, each with their own incomplete configuration systems. In any kind of match up, MacOS will win on simplicity and intuitiveness hands down simply because every other option is just much worse.
To an extent, but then the test is seeing how people who have never used any system interact. I maintain the MacOS paradigm is objectively less intuitive than alternatives.
> But we can say this: there's nothing intuitive about Windows' incomplete transition to the new settings app that still sometimes requires you to jump to the old control panel system; there's nothing intuitive about Linux' 50 desktop environments, each with their own incomplete configuration systems
Sure, that's clumsy. Not really relevant though.
> In any kind of match up, MacOS will win on simplicity and intuitiveness hands down simply because every other option is just much worse.
Strongly disagree. MacOS comes in behind Windows for certain, and likely behind a couple of FOSS DEs as well. Windows has issues, but usability isn't one of them.
However, there's a talk[0] from three years ago. I would imagine the architecture has changed since then.
So as I suspected, posix-subsystem is a single process that provides the POSIX support for all other process, so it's a single point of failure: https://docs.managarm.org/handbook/sys-arch/posix/index.html
It's interesting that they have some kind of subsystem to run code in kernel space too, very against typical microkernel thinking for isolation/safety reasons.
thor seems to be an actual "bottleneck".