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Comment by Dewie | Hacker News Reader

> Do one thing well.

Do you really demand that an OS should only 'do one thing well'? :ø)

Well, yes. That's what makes Unix OSes so great. Programs all the way down to the command line are separate from the OS. Modules and drivers are also semantically separate from the core.

So how would you envision that the Emacs OS should be structured/used?

Something like this:

  sudo aptitude purge emacs
  sudo apt-get install vim gvim
  gvim

Edit: Clearly I'm joking. If you wanted a serious answer, Emacs is just a large, easily extensible program. It's not really an OS. That's like saying Google Chrome (contains a package manager, web browser, text editor, scripting language, and much more) is an OS.

You have heard of Chromebooks, right? It wouldn't be a far stretch to imagine a developer laptop where Emacs was the entire interface.

Chrome OS runs on a Linux kernel. Linux is the core OS for Chromebooks. Similarly, an "Emacs OS" would need a real OS underneath it.

Emeacs is an OS. It just needs its own kernel.

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