Essence: A desktop OS built from scratch, for control and simplicity

At first glance, I thought this was another Linux distro with a custom window manager, not a new operating system. But it is its own operating system! It&#x27;s got a custom kernel and everything. Built from scratch, indeed.<p>I&#x27;m always impressed when people build their own operating systems or browsers from scratch. Few of them will attain widespread adoption. That doesn&#x27;t mean they aren&#x27;t valuable though. Kudos to the developers.

That&#x27;s one hell of a great landing page. It tells me pretty much everything I want to know.<p><pre><code> - Beautiful screenshot. - &quot;Essence will happily run on low-powered hardware. It can take less than 30MB of drive space, and boot with even less RAM. No tasks run in the background, giving your applications all the space they need.&quot; - Amazing performance. - All the code is made available under the MIT license. - Demo video. </code></pre> I can immediately imagine many different ways this could be popular in areas not covered by the main desktop OSes. The only other thing I guess I want to know is the developer toolchain&#x2F;experience and &quot;getting started&quot; which is covered by Discord&#x2F;Patreon links.<p>I think it would do well to differentiate it from current desktop OSes, e.g. first class support for touch interfaces, etc. Imagine all the IoT devices needing UIs.

It seems they stopped working on it in April 2022, for the most part:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;nakst&#x2F;essence&#x2F;-&#x2F;graphs&#x2F;master?ref_type=heads" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;nakst&#x2F;essence&#x2F;-&#x2F;graphs&#x2F;master?ref_type=he...</a>

I like the following structure at the end of the assembler boot block code:<p>times (0x1B4 - ($-$$)) nop<p>disk_identifier: times 10 db 0<p>partition_entry_1: times 16 db 0<p>partition_entry_2: times 16 db 0<p>partition_entry_3: times 16 db 0<p>partition_entry_4: times 16 db 0<p>dw 0xAA55<p>That&#x27;s elegant, because it shows where&#x2F;how the disk identifier and the 4 classic MBR partitions <i>coexist</i> inside of the same first 512 bytes in the boot block, with the boot code... (it is assumed that AFTER the boot block is copied to disk that the partitions will be set by an outside program (i.e., fdisk or similar program) to appropriate values... otherwise MBR partitions would be set to 0 from copying the boot block -- but that&#x27;s a minor sub-point... it&#x27;s <i>elegant</i> code -- I&#x27;ve seen a lot of boot block code, and I&#x27;ve never seen that construct before!)

I&#x27;d love to see an OS like this take hold for people who don&#x27;t need all the backward compatibility and server goodies in Linux and who don&#x27;t want to deal with Microsoft or Apple. Something like Chrome OS but not so locked down.

That 0.7s boot from bios to desktop is impressive.

I&#x27;ve been wondering how an OS draws a high-quality GUI.<p>I&#x27;ve don&#x27;t bare metal development and drawn simple graphics with a linear frame buffer, but for a UI like this or Windows, I&#x27;m wondering how the images that represent the UI components are generated.<p>I don&#x27;t see any png files for window borders, but I do see code for setting pixels to the correct color for a theme.<p>Are UI components in an OS usually programmed and not created in an image editor and then tiled?

Related:<p><i>Essence: Desktop operating system built from scratch</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29950740">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29950740</a> - Jan 2022 (290 comments)

Usually new OS efforts seem like they&#x27;re too &quot;boil the ocean&quot; impractical. I like this. It immediately sticks out as something with some promise.<p>Tips:<p>(1) Add virtualization early. That way it&#x27;d be possible to run other OSes and thus familiar apps. In the long term a seamless form of virtualization similar to Parallels Coherence could be explored as a way to run foreign apps on their host OS. This would be a short-medium term solution to the &#x27;no apps&#x27; problem that dogs any new OS effort.<p>(2) Limit hardware support scope by targeting a few target platforms. I&#x27;d suggest Linux-oriented laptop vendors like System76 and Framework, the Raspberry Pi, and a few other familiar things with related ethos.<p>(3) Look at using foreign drivers such as those from Linux or BSD via a compatibility API. This might let you support notoriously painful to support things like wifi cards.

Sorry for the aside, just in case you do not notice this from nakst&#x27;s (the author of Essence) homepage, at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nakst.gitlab.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nakst.gitlab.io&#x2F;</a><p>&gt; <i>nakst&#x27;s webpage &#x2F;&#x2F; This site works best with JavaScript disabled</i><p>Great guy ;)

Looks great. I hope they keep developing it!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;nakst&#x2F;essence&#x2F;-&#x2F;issues&#x2F;20" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;nakst&#x2F;essence&#x2F;-&#x2F;issues&#x2F;20</a>

Impressive work!<p>And oddly, it would be even more impressive if they built their own Web Browser from scratch ...

This is really interesting!<p>&gt; It can take less than 30MB of drive space<p>A modern display driver alone takes disk space&#x2F;RAM in the class of 30MB, so Essence is really tiny. The probably downside is that it cannot utilise modern hardware.

It needs, at the very least, a vt100 terminal app, a C&#x2F;C++&#x2F;Rust compiler (ideally to llvm so this can run on ARM or ia64 or anything else), a decent code editor, and a basic web browser.

It looks pretty clean and sharp, awesome job! People that build OS (and other low-level software) always have my respect, and first of all because of their dedication and commitment

This is really, really significant imo. The idea of system wide tabs has been in the back of my head for a while, as well as moving away from the linux kernel. I&#x27;ve messed around with it a bit and I&#x27;m very impressed.<p>Starting from scratch is awesome, and I&#x27;m firmly in the group that we should not strive for backwards compatibility at this stage, and instead aim to maximize intuitiveness for both developers and users.

This model of desktop can still be immensely useful. All we need to do is support only a few high level protocols.<p>For e.g. twitter-like streams &#x2F; RSS, simple high level workflows for generic business purposes, and so on.<p>Browsers should necessarily not be supported. Layout options should be fixed, and totally protocol specific. (For e.g. a twitter-like stream can only be displayed in limited ways. )

The GUI is reminiscent of BeOS <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;BeOS" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;BeOS</a> or Haiku <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.haiku-os.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.haiku-os.org&#x2F;</a>

Very nice! Hope to see more of it in the future. The window has old chrome vibes, it is not a bad thing.<p>&gt; If you&#x27;re interested in contributing, join our Discord server to discuss ideas with other developers.<p>Would be nice to have a dedicated forum (Discourse?) instead, but I get that it is too soon for this project.

I love the ideas and this is impressive progress for a indy OS. My only point of discontent is that every window looks like a tiny little Chrome window. Not a GUI look and feel I care for at all. There is, however, no accounting for taste so I can&#x27;t really fault the devs for that.

I would only install it if I absolutely had to install a fresh install of an OS. Fortunately&#x2F;unfortunately, this happens around every three months when my computer inevitably breaks down, so I&#x27;ll install this instead of <i>Ubuntu</i>.

Nice and detailed demo. What will take this from toy to a product to daily driver?<p>I love the idea of all application windows being able to be moved into tab groups. Are there window managers that do similar things?

The example &quot;Hello World&quot; program source code shows how simple the event-loop style of development looks here. I like it, and it does look like something that could be useful.<p>Thanks for sharing!

It&#x27;s simple and clean looking now now, but with time and success, you will join the darkside.

Kudos to the developers. It looks gorgeous, and I eagerly await further progress. :)

Hmmm. Seems to be Intel-only (or at least I can&#x27;t find an ARM64 branch)

OK, do yourself a favour and watch the intro video: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=aGxt-tQ5BtM">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=aGxt-tQ5BtM</a><p>I have NEVER seen an OS installation (and boot sequence) as fast as that - just incredible.

Very cool! Would this be portable to a Raspberry Pi?

the user creates window for the application, not applications for themself. like in plan9&#x2F;rio.

everything has tabs, righteous

Haven’t watched the video yet. What is the kernel philosophy? Is it a mono or microkernel?

I think any new OS should be written in a memory save language like Rust. And there are actually some that use Rust in the works I think, could not name names but ...