You're more than free to do with your own time what you wish. These projects aren't harming you in any way. Who cares what enthusiasts want to do for fun? They're not trying to supplant the OS on your desktop. They're learning something and having fun doing it. I love these sorts of projects.

In contrast, many of us treat computers as a magic black box. The abstraction is great for productively building web apps. But, we've lost sight of how things work and I think that's led to steep decline in performance and, perhaps, security. I don't pine for manual resource management in all things, but knowing how syscalls work can help build context on when and why you should use them. Revisiting how to build an OS that isn't rooted in decades-old Linux or BSD code could be really instructive.

My concern is more so that this project will burn up real resources and be abandoned.

You’re highlighting how subjective things can be and I don’t disagree.

What isn’t subjective is the generations of the 1900s are the first to leave behind an existential threat driven by wasteful economic choices and they seem to be indifferent to doing so just to have fun.

Myself and lot of other software engineers I have worked with feel our jobs are meaningless; the future won’t care about these technologies. They’re hardly regenerative medicine or something so life changing daily life itself is improved forever like indoor plumbing and electricity.

But we feel captured by nostalgia for this work and form of economics, and apathy for a whole lot of people who will be dead before climate change is real problem

Some people grow gardens. Some rebuild cars. Others 3D print things. Others yet enjoy woodworking. One the grand features of our current society is you're not working 14 hour days, seven days a week in a factory. Without a doubt, there are those working multiple jobs and still struggling to make ends meet. But, fortunately, many are able to work a single job and live a relatively comfortable life. Those that can often have hobbies. It helps them unwind and maybe even enjoy life a little since otherwise so much of it is spent working or sleeping. It's downtime and largely considered positive for mental health and, consequently, one's ability to contribute to society.

Most people aren't solving deep societal needs in their free time. If you want to limit it to software, most of us have jobs that hardly improve society or the planet. Most open source code isn't advancing society. What I don't understand is why you've singled out the participants of this particular project for your ire.

I don't know any of the individuals involved personally. My guess is they're not the ones that built physical products with PFCs, ran coal-powered factories and operated strip mining operations, designed nuclear weaponry, or even fly personal jets. I'd hazard to say your average front-end developer chugging through batteries with inefficient frameworks is doing more harm than this project.

If your aim is to clean up the tech industry, I think that's laudable. I believe tech people have for the most part shirked their own contribution to our carbon footprint or other societal needs. But, I think you'll find there are much bigger targets actively doing harm (or certainly not helping things) regularly because it's profitable and/or convenient.

Ironically this was what caused Workplace OS and Pink/Taligent to fail. It was exactly trying to build a Win 95 clone with UNIX-like internals. One of the biggest failures in modern software development.

We haven't improved much since Win 95 in terms of desktop OS UI/UX. Could you remember any substantial UI improvements between Win 95 and Win 11? Local search, improved UAC and a shitload of ads.

> Could you remember any substantial UI improvements between Win 95 and Win 11

Yes I can. Most OSes these days have a OS level fuzzy searching functionality. This has been my preferred way of launching applications on Windows (Win key), Linux (Win key) and MacOS (CMD+Spc).

I press a hotkey, type the first few characters of the program I'm trying to go to, and press enter. This is also common in text editors and even some web apps. Improves the UX of discovering commands, as compared to endlessly nested menus like the 90s.

There's loads of other things that have improved but this one is just so basic that I couldn't live without it.

Let's not live with rose tinted glasses. Yes, there's backsliding in terms of UX but don't ignore the improvements.

I also tend to use Win key search for launching programs. I would be interested to see if an OS could focus that use case as a primary means of UI. If it did become central to usage, I’d love to see a commonality emerge across terminal centric and GUI OS styles.

I'm not living with rose tinted glasses, I mentioned search and UAC in my original message. This is not enough to warrant criticism of Win 95 clones. I bet you could add search to Serenity without changing the look and it would still be called a Win 95 clone.

It's gone downhill. Scrollbars that only appear half the times you need them, buttons that aren't buttons, not-buttons that are in fact buttons, instead of curated menus Evince has three places you can click and hope to find the function you want in one of them, it's just a mess.

Win 95 had the basic UX down, and Tiger made it look very pretty, but it didn't need any more fixing.

I think this is due to the operating system being replaced by a combination of (1) the web browser; and (2) Steam. Nobody cares what the OS itself is doing, because they aren't using it.

Windows 95 brought us those god-awful cascading menus that would disappear the second you missed a hover target by a single pixel. I for one am glad those died out.

I don't understand how anyone could say that mess was good.

What are you talking about, cascading menus that disappear are still with us, they moved to the web!

i'd go as far as to say there have been zero improvements, substantial or minor.

i mean, thank god windows now has three distinct and clashing UI styles in different parts of the OS, i don't know how we ever managed to live with just one.

The window snapping/tiling feature is nice, but not nearly good enough to replace i3wm.

A few things that pop up for me:

1. Tabs in browser and other applications.

2. Font rendering, hinting, anti-aliasing and subpixel rendering. Together with high-resolution screens for more people.

3. Better multi-threading for applications. Back in the day, one application crashes and everything is stuck. Improvements here are part of user experience, though not directly UI.

4. Less crashing and vague errors in my experience, much more refined software (if you pick your choices right).

5. Smooth audio and video, together with much better support for codecs out of the box.

6. Better plug-and-play, no internal isa cards anymore, external all usb or similar.

7. Many more options for free software and gratis software, but choices for commercial still exist.

8. App stores which makes discovery and installation easier for users.

That many things have turned for the worse, does not mean there are no things that turned better.

You are right, but most of what you mentioned is not UI and its UX.

Down with graybeards, up with salt and pepperbeards

>You think a throw back Win 95 clones with UNIX-like internals is what modern users want?

They aren't building it for "modern users", they're building it for fun.

To build a usable operating system you need manpower. To get manpower you need money or you need to build a community around an interesting project that people will work on for free. Andreas has managed to do both of these things.

Serenity is not just another UNIX clone, it's a unique project with the idea of doing everything from scratch. The project uses modern tools like GitHub and Discord so there's a larger pool of people willing to join the project. Had it been all on mailing lists it would be nowhere near what it is today.

Prove “fun” isn’t just an emotional equivocation to burn resources living in one’s nostalgia only to quickly abandon it like numerous attempts at amiga and commodore style OS clones being built for fun in the 00s

If it’s not for modern computer users and lacks a meaningful ecosystem of software and purpose its first worlders avoiding contributing to real work they externalize on others

There’s enough academic wank in the world. Better to focus on pushing computing forward for the aggregate than serve personal ego

Oddly enough, other people find enjoyment in things you might find pointless. Maybe just let them be? Not every waking second needs to be spent on "pushing computing forward" or whatever. Sometimes we just want to do something cool, even if it's useless.

Yeah it’s not cool either though :-/

And I mean from my reference you (and the downvoters) just complained about someone having a different opinion than yours so shrug

It's not complaining about having a different opinion, it's that the way you present it is vitriolic. It doesn't matter (at least to me) if you don't like the project or don't see the point. There's just no reason to insult and demean the project and its creators.

> and the downvoters

I only downvoted you for whining about downvotes.

It's also specifically mentioned in the HN guidelines:

"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There’s also a bunch there about how targeting others and posting complaints about others makes for uninteresting reading so avoid it

Just saying

so yeah, don't do that.

just saying

I still think Snow Leopard was the peak OS