Hacker News Reader

Comment by utopiah | Hacker News Reader

I feel like most articles challenging OSes have no idea what an OS is.

Sure question what the latest tool can offer and how to integrate with it... but that's just being an app, or a window manager, or a package manager, or a distribution, that's not challenging what the OS itself is and does.

If your OS doesn't change how a computer allocates resources, then you are talking about higher level, and that can be super valuable too, arguably more valuable, but ... that's a different thing.

PS: also chroot (half a century, just checked for the fun of it), jails, containers, VMs, etc limiting how the allocation can be done do exist and have been used for decades already.

View on HN

Having built software runnging on everything from microcontrollers to cloud servers to browsers, I also have no idea what an OS is.

In the context of a microcontroller, is it an RTOS? How is that different from something like Embassy with Rust, where hardware allocation and coordination is handled more at build time and less at runtime? In the context of a something showing up on a screen, is an OS something providing a UI framework and hardware abstraction - something like Win32 or Cocoa? What does that make Chrome?

In 2006 it felt like an answer to the question "what is an OS" was straightforward. In 2026, I'm rather confident that I don't have a single, simple answer. If there were ever a time to re-assess what we thought we knew about computing - now seems like a good time to do it.

Which is why notions like freestanding, monitor and such also exist.

As far as I am concerned an OS is really simple to define. Its the thing that manages hardware resources on a device to allow other software to run using said resources.

LLMs are not OSes and never will be, they will always need some software to first bootstrap the hardware before the software which processes the weighting can begin.

Its like we need Richard Stallman to come and argue the difference between GNU and Linux again!

>LLMs are not OSes and never will be

If we ask this a different way, is there a single self executable file when written to the sector of the disk the hardware looks for can contain the instructions for the hardware and the weights all in one?

I can't thing of any informational theory reason why this can't be the case. The only thing I can think of structuring such far more complex and less worthwhile than just having separate layers. Dealing with this biological/intelligence mess in humans is already hard enough as it is.

How is that any different to adding a calculator or word processing app in with your os?

The OS bootstraps the hardware and allows the software to run. If your software is contained in the same blob then great, but it still needs the bootstrapping code first.

The bootstrapping/hardware management portion on its own would be considered an OS but the LLM code would not, I think thats the main distinction here.

It seems that by that definition the BIOS would be the only thing that could be called an operating system, the bootloader is just a piece of software akin to a calculator or word processing app, and Linux, Windows, and MacOS some data file that you're loading, like an mp3.

Fair point, I reduced it a bit far to bootloader only there, the os also needs to manage and allocate resources dynamically to the other software too.

Agreed. Investing in creating a whole new phone just to usher in the concepts here sounds like an expensive and slow way to do it.

> that's a different thing.

I hear what you’re saying, but we don’t have a word for that different thing. OS means the kernel. But OS also means the entire distribution - all of macOS, all of iOS, all of windows, Ubuntu, Android, etc.

Until we have a standard word for the ui “shell” that comes out of the box with the OS distribution, people - including me - are gonna call (and think of it) as the OS. Or part of the os. Or something like that.

I can't quite tell if you're being cheeky

> we don’t have a word for ... the ... distribution

> Until we have a ... word for the ... shell

distribution/distro and shell are exactly the words we have for these things

But OS sounds more impressive/important, so it's a lot more prevalent.

Microsoft hasn't really used that nomenclature since NT took over all their operating systems. Windows shell+kernel = OS. MacOS = shell+kernel = OS.

It's really the unix/linux world that stuck hard with these being separate things.

Exactly. The windows operating system isn’t just the nt kernel. It’s also all the UI that comes out of the box, that sits on top of that kernel. What is iOS? An operating system. What kind of software is springboard? It’s part of iOS. Part of the operating system.

An operating system is a lot more than just the kernel.

i.e. most users think the OS is shell, not the kernel.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com