News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more? by elihu on Tuesday December 29, 2020 @05:57AM (#25568646)
If the OS can run in a virtualized environment, you can kind of cheat by letting some other OS like Linux handle the hardware compatibility. It's not as aesthetically satisfying as running on bare metal, but it can work.

If some company wanted to create an Apple-like desktop experience with purpose-built hardware but with an open OS, this could be a good route: implement all the drivers needed to run well on bare metal on the company's own hardware products, but anyone can run it in a hypervisor on any computer.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more? by tabtab on Tuesday December 29, 2020 @11:21AM (#25571317)
That seems kind of a circular argument: we need another OS but which emulates existing OS's for compatibility. I agree that compatibility probably overrides other concerns. A 3rd OS would need some revolutionary feature(s) to overcome its compatibility limits. And that revolutionary feature would be something that can't be added to Windows or (x)nix. Anyone want to suggest game-changing OS features?

A better goal would be to isolate OS features to give us more choice. The file system would be independent of the GUI engine, which would be independent of the executable manager, etc. It would give one mix-and-match ability. Possible partitioning:

    - Execution/task manager
    - GUI
    - File system
    - Security system
    - App and upgrade manager
    - Integrator
[ Parent | on HN ]