witheld

> You just need a passing understand of computer architecture and registers to understand that. And if you want something didactic

I'd say I'm just the only one here not pretending I'm not abrasive. This was abrasive from the start, and every comment has been abrasive.

> Look, lots of people like reenacting period dramas and doing things like renaissance faires. But period drama and RenFaire folks don't act like they're doing fundamental research.

Honestly look at this. Do you just want me to be abrasive in your special style instead? Should I make sure I patronize everyone subtly? Is that the end goal?

If you think that computers are solved, that you have to do some specific thing to research computers like use Linux, or run Docker, or get popular, you've missed the mark.

There's no reason you get to decide what research is because you came up with a funny insult, and if you're saying people can't learn more about computers by using them, you're just a gatekeeper.

> And let folks have opinions on the way OS research should work without calling them names.

Are you kidding me? You just literally wrote that it's comparable to the renaissance fair instead of research. How can be you so hypocritical?

"Popular", "Modern Workloads", "meaningful ideas"

You are a buzzword machine with no substance. All of these are nothing more than an obsession with some idea of success.

Will modern apps, workloads, quote on quote "meaningful" things run on uxn? No! But we can still research what you can do with modern aspirations and knowledge on an 8bit computer.

The goal is not to run some existing software, the goal is to learn. To make new software, new workloads, new ideas.

If you want to run "modern workloads", these days just grab a web browser- you can probably even do your GPU research in there!

Do that, that's wonderful if your research is about things you can do on normal operating systems like a web browser. But if your research is about computers, you probably need to say, design a new computer (uxn) or expose yourself to different kinds of computers. I suggest you do both, write a compiler and write a VM for it!

You'll get maybe a dozen users, and you'll learn, and you'll teach people things. All without any "success"

That's all OP cares about, success. To them, computing isn't worth it if it's not popular. There's no reason to write code that won't be used, no reason to research if it won't literally change the landscape of consumer computing.

But consumer computing will never change, it will remain made of a stack of legacy parts in a trenchcoat. The only real change we've gotten in a decade is Vulkan/DX12- and those APIs just expose graphics the way consoles do. We've done that for decades it's still not new.

Research because it's fun, because it's an artistic outlet. make tiny virtual computers you can run in weird places and then run them in weird places! Because you can! Learn because it is engaging, and because sharing what you learn is rewarding.

I'm not interested in any capitalist perspective of an OS- this kind of thinking is exactly why I'm using a damn teletype emulator. Profitable, "successful" computing that gets more than "a handful" of users is web tech. They can keep it.

I'll just stop at the top- no, I can't use Linux as a base, except perhaps as a host for a virtual system. For me I've been playing with uxn, but Inferno does exist. And you're right, using Inferno on a stripped Linux system WOULD be better than using Linux.

Operating systems grinded to a halt a decade before Plan 9 came out. I wish what you were saying was true, I wish that I didn't have to use a teletype emulator on Linux with no real mouse support, I wish I could do unprivileged resource organization (I'll give you ten minutes to try 'unshare', bind mounts, and "unionfs" on Linux before giving up).

It is pathetic that operating systems have remained crap for 30 years, but given that nothing has moved forward, there's no reason not to start with the newest operating system we have: Plan 9.

None of those require JS at all, except the pizza monitor.