So first off: Very cool. <i>Amazingly</i> polished, and self-hosting! Especially since it looks to be an actually-independent project with POSIX as an <i>optional</i> compat layer.<p>I feel like the features that are unique are mostly in 3 groups:<p>1. Features that shouldn't be unique to this system. Tabbed windows have <i>occasionally</i> happened on other systems, and probably should become more common, and there's no reason it shouldn't work on other systems. I hope this inspires other people to copy;)<p>2. Features that only work if you have really tight integration or different primitives than most OSs are using. Programs updating file name when you rename from the file manager, or the file manager showing when files are open... <i>might</i> be possible to graft on to other systems, but it'd be a right pain. Even systems like MacOS are going to struggle - the whole OS is under one company that <i>could</i> do cross-functional stuff like that, but any time it touches applications you need external developers to support it and that may or may not work out.<p>3. Features that are possible, but nobody else does it because it's impractical - possibly only impractical from their starting points, though. Showing total size of subdirectories is expensive on ex. Linux because you have to walk every file recursively. I don't know if they're just eating the cost because they haven't hit a case where it matters, or if their system actually makes it cheap (I could easily imagine a filesystem that moved the calculation cost up front).
If you want a fleshed out demo [0], we had the author present at our conference recently. Worth a watch.<p>[0] <a href="https://media.handmade-seattle.com/essence/" rel="nofollow">https://media.handmade-seattle.com/essence/</a>
So many interesting/fascinating concepts and ideas that will remain relegated to niche communities because of basically <i>one</i> problem: lack of drivers. This is the problem that must be solved if we ever want to move away from the dominance of a few OSes "too big to fail" and their million compromises to a thriving field where competent programmers can create new OSes as easily as now they can create new apps.
This is insane, I can't imagine how much work went into it.<p>I had a similar idea as a kid, I was pissed at all the bloat consuming my cpu and ram on windows so I wanted to build my own os that would run a single app taking advantage of 100% of the hardware. I learned some assembly and managed to create a bootable floppy disk, then quickly gave up, realizing how much work a functioning os would take...
Spent some time reading through the networking stack, scheduler, synchronization, and networking device driver. It was a total breath of fresh air to read code in this area that wasn't a total spaghetti of years of maintenance and feature creep. Really happy to see a project like this!
This is an amazing piece of work, but it's clearly a labor of love: this isn't going to have any real-world use any time soon.<p>Where operating systems are headed is more towards security (process isolation, bulletproof input etc), not lightweight GUIs on top of thin kernels like this.<p>Are there any passion (or other) projects that explore this? I know about Qubes, but that's more like a heavy layer on top of a heavy duty GUI, on top of a Linux kernel.
I really think this is impressive. I also like the unique take on windowing. There's a video here: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGxt-tQ5BtM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGxt-tQ5BtM</a><p>Great job!
Very cool. Nice that it runs without all the processes... But that will come at a certain point haha.<p>I like that they implemented composing tabs between different applications. This is the way I try to organize work/projecta/projectb/personal use, but it never works with current osses.<p>Spaces in macOS is actually kind of useless, because certain applications have windows across screens (finder, chrome).<p>Tabbed Finder windows are the most useless thing ever.. It's Apple listening to HN haha.<p>Anyway, screenshot on twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/_nakst/status/1477247856805351425/photo/1" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/_nakst/status/1477247856805351425/photo/...</a> and gitlab <a href="https://gitlab.com/nakst/essence" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.com/nakst/essence</a>
> Essence will happily run on low-powered hardware<p>The thing is, when I see a mention of "low-powered hardware", I'm instantly thinking of a Raspberry Pi 4. I assume this isn't supported (yet).
Amazing work! I just watched the author's video about the UI features: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGxt-tQ5BtM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGxt-tQ5BtM</a><p>The app in a tab approach seems really neat.<p>I guess if big tech decides to stop developing new useful features, we will have to start doing it on our own.
I love minimalist stuff, but I don't really believe this is a good idea. It's not compatible with a lot of things.<p>Sure it's cool, but the problem will always be the lack of open hardware. Personally I will always be more curious about smartphone OS made from scratch.<p>The only think I want right now, is to use old smartphones with a lightweight OS.
Why I see a new OS I always like to see what it brings to the table, specially if they take the effort of not being yet another POSIX clone written in C, without anything else to brag about.<p>So it is nice that it makes use of C++ and there are some frameworks already like the GUI stack, however this is missing from the website.
This is part of the handmade software movement. An effort to focus down on elegant software development using primitives rather than generic libraries and testing the status quo. Exciting to see this project move along!
There are a lot of experimental/hobby OSs coming out recently, and it's great to see new ideas. I'd love to see more experimentation with stable driver API/ABIs. Decoupling drivers from the kernel might improve hardware support, because those with deep hardware knowledge could come in, write a driver, and then no one would ever have to update it just because of kernel changes.
Is this OS a fork of SerenityOS (also completely written from scratch in C++)?<p>I'm amazed how many single person or small team developed operating systems are out there. Another one I like is RedoxOS (written in Rust) and Resea (microkernel written in C). Also, there's KolibriOS (written entirely in Assembler).
This reminds me of an OS built with asm for Dell desktop PC’s around 2005-ish. The DE had most things you’d expect from a Linux distro at the time, including true transparency (IIRC), and the whole thing fit on a floppy. Saw it in a Linux mag at the time.
What is a "desktop operating system"? Why do you need to reinvent operating system when all you create is a (rather traditional looking) desktop environment?