[HN Gopher] SerenityOS demo at Handmade Seattle 2021 [video]
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SerenityOS demo at Handmade Seattle 2021 [video]
Author : akling
Score : 749 points
Date : 2021-11-18 21:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (media.handmade-seattle.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (media.handmade-seattle.com)
| tester756 wrote:
| Dumping data to json seems to be incredibly handy!
|
| Thank you for your effort folks
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Please add an "always on top" button to the window decorations
| alongside maximize/minimize/close. I want it badly and feel very
| frustrated because it only exists in KDE. I want it in all the
| non-tiling window environments I use including XFCE, Windows, Mac
| and Serenity.
| marcodiego wrote:
| SerenityOS is interesting. Hope it doesn't get the same end as
| SkyOS.
| karteum wrote:
| SerenityOS is licenced under BSD-2-Clause License while SkyOS
| was entirely proprietary (and therefore disappeared when its
| development stalled), so the comparison seems irrelevant (your
| point would be more relevant if you were mentioning Syllable
| instead, which was quited advanced and open-source, yet
| somewhat seems to have disappeared...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllable_Desktop . But since
| source-code is available anyone could restart it :)
|
| I also hope that SerenityOS has a long and successful lifespan,
| as it seems promising !)
| marcodiego wrote:
| AFAIR SkyOS started as open source. But considering current
| direction, I really don't think there is any risk of the same
| happening to SerenityOS.
| busymom0 wrote:
| Does this need a specific hardware to run?
|
| Is it possible to port this to mobile?
| InTheArena wrote:
| I'd honestly love to see this with some modern workloads and
| practices. This guy seems like a total savant - there is
| something to be said for creating a whole system instead of
| layers.
| tayloredu wrote:
| thedailyhustle
| Maksadbek wrote:
| Very impressive! The GUI is very similar to an old friendly
| Windows style, did Andreas intentially designed it such way or
| use some 3rd party framework ?
| stohk wrote:
| From the github 'SerenityOS is a love letter to '90s user
| interfaces with a custom Unix-like core. It flatters with
| sincerity by stealing beautiful ideas from various other
| systems.'
|
| The video in the link, Andreas mentions that its all from
| scratch.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| It's all built from scratch, but it is clearly influenced by
| other systems in terms of design.
|
| I'm not sure how those two points conflict.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| From what I understand about the seminal Apple vs Microsoft
| case in the 90's, theres a limit to how much "look and
| feel" can be patented.
| prohobo wrote:
| I've been thinking recently that Windows 95/98/2000 had better UX
| than you can find nowadays on most websites, and while not
| "beautiful", it was still aesthetic.
|
| That + a good console? Great idea. I'd love to see some
| innovation with the old school design ethos too; maybe there are
| even better ways of displaying controls? Or maybe a new way to
| think about controls that weren't around back then.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Our current product has a UI that is on par with windows 2000.
| We reuse the same ~26 hand-rolled UI elements on a fixed-size
| layout. Things like alpha blending and pixel shaders are a
| distant fantasy for us. Target market is highly regulated B2B,
| so we have more tolerance to work with here. Everything is very
| serious business. No one really cares about button radii or
| drop shadows. They just want to push the paperwork as quickly
| as our screens will come back and then go home. We listen to
| our user delegates on a weekly basis. On the actual telephone
| for up to an hour. Any little UX gripes are usually dealt with
| judiciously as a result.
|
| Nothing is more frustrating than a perfect UI being fucked up
| by the passage of time. You don't need fancy shit. You just
| need consistency and _speed_. Give me back my xp-era explorer
| and start menu snappiness. Put a high speed camera on a windows
| 10 task bar and record someone right clicking on it. You might
| need a larger SD card than originally planned for this
| activity.
| andai wrote:
| XP explorer is so much faster it blows my damn mind. I ran it
| inside Windows 10 in VirtualBox, the explorer window opens
| instantly and navigates instantly, while the new explorer has
| lag with every operation. The best way to see this is to copy
| or rename a file. Explorer, a Microsoft product (presumably
| better integrated with the kernel) will take a second or two
| to show the result of the action that _it itself performed_
| (!!), while Sublime Text open in the background will detect
| the change and display it _instantly._ Madness!
| exikyut wrote:
| I wonder if Explorer is deliberately updating the display
| after a timeout to handle the scenario where many files
| might rename in short succession.
|
| One simple way to handle this could be to compute the timer
| to fire at $last_rename_time + $delay, initialize
| $last_rename_time to 0 (and later set it to the current
| time in milliseconds), then only actually start the timer
| if the calculated value is actually in the future (which it
| won't be for the first run).
|
| Of course... Explorer might (... _still_ ) be using
| periodic polling. xD
|
| You might be able to use Event Tracing for Windows to find
| out if Explorer is actually following events in real time,
| with the minor caveat that it might be a bit of a project.
| I gathered a small handful of ETW-related links over at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28348564 a little
| while back FWIW.
| aallen90 wrote:
| I believe this is what's happening. I read something
| recently from Raymond Chen that it works like:
|
| 1. Open file with the delete flag 2. Call a function to
| set the new file information 3. Close the handle.
|
| The signal that a file was renamed happens in step 2, and
| that signal/event is what many applications subscribe to.
| Explorer will wait until the rename is fully completed
| with the handle closed before showing the change.
| mateuszf wrote:
| XP explorer stars so fast because it's already running. The
| desktop with the icons is actually an explorer window.
| Narishma wrote:
| That's not the case in Windows 10?
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| I feel like way too many engineers ca. 2005-2010
| internalized the misconception that "asynchronous" is
| synonymous with "I don't need to care how long it takes".
| It turns out that the distinction isn't trivial.
| akling wrote:
| >I'd love to see some innovation with the old school design
| ethos too; maybe there are even better ways of displaying
| controls? Or maybe a new way to think about controls that
| weren't around back then.
|
| Oh yeah, this is something we've been exploring (carefully)
| with SerenityOS! There's obviously been a lot of good UI/UX
| innovations since the late 90s, and it's super interesting to
| look for ways to integrate them with the classic aesthetics.
|
| As an example, we use breadcrumb bars in our file manager, to
| display the current directory as a part of separately
| interactive segments.
|
| And we also have "Assistant" which works similarly to macOS
| Spotlight, for fast access to a range of data providers.
|
| I'm sure there are many similar concepts we have yet to
| discover :)
| flenserboy wrote:
| Do check out the Spotlight version in Tiger -- the first
| iteration has been the best iteration of it, by far. You
| might be able to pick up a few things!
| DragonL80 wrote:
| @akling, I want to take a moment to comment just how amazing
| recovery can be. As someone who's suffered some similar
| substance issues. Thank you for being a great example of just
| how amazing of a place the mind can be when its trained onto
| something that gives us meaning and direction. I am in sheer
| awe of what you've created. Its incredibly powerful but yet
| so simple its staggering. I am so following the progress of
| SerenityOS (i get the name too, btw) and look forward to
| seeing great things come of it and from you.
| paraiuspau wrote:
| Just to second what this good person here has said. Having
| suffered with substance abuse myself, it truly is inspiring
| to follow your accomplishments Andreas! I love that your
| hostname is 'courage', and like my fellow poster here,
| Serenity makes a lot of sense. Much strength to others
| having walked/still walking on a dark path.
| codetrotter wrote:
| Did you look into Neumorphism?
|
| It's a recent thing, but in a way it is a callback to making
| it more obvious what is interactible and not.
|
| For a while, quite recently, it seemed to be catching on. But
| then it didn't really catch on like.
|
| But I think SerenityOS with a Neumorphism style would be a
| really interesting experiment.
|
| https://uxdesign.cc/neumorphism-in-user-
| interfaces-b47cef3bf...
| Aeolun wrote:
| I do not like that at all. It looks like the stuff I
| designed when I just started university.
| brandonmenc wrote:
| The Windows 95/98/2000 interfaces are imo kind of just the
| low-res version of Neumorphism.
|
| Which I like.
| 1_player wrote:
| Neumorphism is interesting, but as far away from Windows 95
| style as can be.
|
| It's tactile, yes, but low density, low contrast, borders
| are non existent, colours are used to create intense
| gradient background palettes, instead of using them to
| increase readability and usability.
|
| Neumorphism has all the drawbacks of modern flat design,
| with none of the benefits of old UI design studies. But it
| looks cool.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > As an example, we use breadcrumb bars in our file manager,
| to display the current directory as a part of separately
| interactive segments.
|
| With current 90s themes for GTK+, "breadcrumb" segments
| appear just fine as buttons. It works quite well in practice.
| mysterydip wrote:
| I'm sure you've seen this or similar paper before, but a good
| refresher from the windows 95 team:
| https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-
| windows-9...
| akling wrote:
| Yes! That's such a great post. For people interested in
| this, I strongly recommend getting a hold of the old
| Windows 2000 era user interface guidelines book from
| Microsoft.
| edeion wrote:
| What book are you talking about? Is it "Microsoft Windows
| User Experience" published by Microsoft Professional
| Editions?
|
| Aside: Thank you for your video! It looks great and
| that's yet another OS I'd like to try and play with --
| along with Plan 9, which Serenity made me think of a bit,
| and TempleOS because of the soul-saving effect of
| devoting to a hard piece of beautiful software
| craftmanship.
| akling wrote:
| Yes indeed! "Microsoft Windows User Experience". I got a
| used copy off of Amazon last year for $2
| gfody wrote:
| I think that era of Windows stuck to the literature and best
| practices, the UI spoke to us in its own visual language and
| let us know what could be clicked or right-clicked or that it
| had focus and might do something if you hit the spacebar etc.
| etc. things that behave similarly look alike, all the clues you
| need to learn some software on your own were there, the visual
| language was teaching us how we're meant to use it, the more
| familiar we were with windows software the quicker we could
| pickup new windows software.
|
| and then I don't know what happened Steven Sinofsky showed up
| with radical ideas that software should be beautiful and
| everything sort of went to hell? curious if there was actually
| some kind of event marking the beginning of the end of
| intuitive software design for MS
| pjmlp wrote:
| Not only on the UI level, they were also responsible for
| COM's revenge on .NET after Longhorn, and the golden spot it
| now enjoys on Windows APIs, although most that don't do
| Windows think of it as gone.
| rodgerd wrote:
| The biggest problem - across a lot of fronts - was that we
| abandoned the idea of consistency and rooting these things in
| research. The original success of the Mac interface was
| rooted in the HIG which provided rigorous, clear, and (at
| least sometimes) evidence-based principles for UI/UX. Sun
| paid a bunch for work to be done on the GNOME 1.x series at
| one point, to try and significantly improve it.
|
| The HIG is no more at Apple. GNOME design decisions are
| justified with comments like "I asked some friends and they
| liked this better". Most of the pain in Windows 10 are all
| the jagged edges where you cut from one era to another for no
| particularly good reason.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| Fundamentally, ui has to be a consequence of function -
| there's a pragmatic reality to how a thing is used that
| informs the limits of the representation of controls. In a
| visual context, it's less about skeumorphic analogs and more
| about how the brain maps those controls to things we already
| know.
|
| This is muscle memory and plasticity in action - the relative
| locations, stateful appearance, and behavior of controls gets
| mapped in our brains in the same way as taxi drivers learning
| the routes in a city, a violinist learning fingerings, or a
| child learning the alphabet.
|
| "Muscle memory" is required to establish foundations of more
| complex behaviors. Once you've built a user interface, you
| should not ever touch elements upon which the users have
| built those muscle memory mappings. Yo Yo Ma would be as lost
| as a child if you told him he had to play the bassoon instead
| of cello. After a couple years of practice, some of the
| higher level artistry could be brought to bear on the new
| instrument, but it's the low level fundamentals that matter.
|
| Firefox screwed with fundamentals, and their market share is
| evidence of why that shouldn't be done.
|
| Windows keeps pushing down that path as well, mistaking their
| current dominance in desktop as something absolute.
| nmstoker wrote:
| Mac also caved after a real highpoint of good definition in
| the 90s.
|
| With MS, they just seemed to stop paying attention to their
| own guidance and much preferred doing their own thing (see
| most editions of Office!), people just got fed up and it
| seems like it crumbled from there.
| ansible wrote:
| > _... let us know what could be clicked or right-clicked
| ..._
|
| Oh my gosh, yes. This is what drives me to distraction with
| recent Android releases. I'm tapping on things in the battery
| settings menu that _used_ to do something, but no, not
| anymore.
|
| Seriously, what is so damn awful about having _some_ visual
| indication of what is a button?
| laurent92 wrote:
| And the keyboard shortcuts! Don't forget the keyboard
| shortcuts! Which could help you automate, if you save a
| Windows macro and repeat it.
|
| And the F1-Help! In context, boring but always available.
|
| And the rearrangeable toolbars, native!! The status bar, not
| the flimsy tooltip at the bottom which disappears.
|
| And the treeviews! And the files ordered by name! Nowadays
| everything is ordered by "Most recently seen" so you can go
| back to the past because of the infinite roll. Everything was
| ordered and safe there. But you would lose your mind if you
| didn't reorganize your desktop regularly, and that has faded
| away, no-one needs to organize files nowadays.
|
| Windows had reached an incredible level of usability,
| complete with blind and disability support, scriptable,
| standardized, reorganizable, repeatable UIs.
|
| Then the web appeared and despite having a searchbox in every
| app, there still isn't a keyboard shortcut for it.
| 1_player wrote:
| > the web appeared and despite having a searchbox in every
| app, there still isn't a keyboard shortcut for it
|
| This infuriates me. None of the browsers have a shortcut to
| "search this highlighted text with Google". I instead have
| to right click, and carefully pick the option between
| "Print" and "Copy".
|
| Not a single one, for an operation I do 200 times a day. I
| do not understand how it is possible. It's the most common
| operation I do in a browser.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| I use Ctrl-C Ctrl-T Ctrl-V ENTER for this.
| jbbe wrote:
| All my browsers (firefox, chrome and safair) on mac have
| this behavior at least. Do none of the windows browsers
| have the feature?
| bluedino wrote:
| I think that Windows 2000 and Max OS were the pinnacle of
| clean Interfaces.
|
| It seems like once the graphics capabilities became common,
| OS interface developers used them even when they shouldn't
| have. Remember when moving windows in Linux had a "jiggle" to
| them? The genie effect in OS X? What about the "cube" of
| multiple desktop? I still don't know what the point of
| transparent windows is.
|
| A few effects are useful - like aero peek in Windows.
| michaelbrave wrote:
| I remember really old Macs had a thing to pull the bottom
| corner up to take a peek at what was behind that window, it
| was neat and never seen again
| edgyquant wrote:
| I think a lot of these things make interactions more
| pleasant, definitely more aesthetically pleasing. I know
| people love to hate on everything new but I grew up on
| early windows (my first PC was Windows 95) and I always
| thought it was kinda ugly but PCs couldn't handle much
| more.
| tpxl wrote:
| I think you can face-lift the W95/W2000 system without
| losing the usability, people just didn't do that. That's
| what I hate the most about "modern" UIs, designers make
| them look pretty and degrade usability, instead of just
| making them pretty.
| CRConrad wrote:
| > That's what I hate the most about "modern" UIs,
| designers make them look pretty and degrade usability,
| instead of just making them pretty.
|
| What's worse is, (at least IMO) they aren't even
| particularly pretty.
| CRConrad wrote:
| > I still don't know what the point of transparent windows
| is.
|
| But about half of Linux YouTubers proudly display them.
| (Between you and them, the clueless one isn't you.)
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| > It seems like once the graphics capabilities became
| common, OS interface developers used them even when they
| shouldn't have.
|
| When you release a new OS version it has to look fresh or
| nobody will want it.
| doubled112 wrote:
| I think some of those animations make the desktop behave a
| little more like objects would in the real world.
|
| For minimize, whether it's a line that shrinks, a genie
| lamp, a simple shrink effect, it's all the same. A simple
| visual cue telling you where it went.
|
| A little form with the function is fine with me. There's a
| ton of computing power in even the weakest of machines.
| That said, I hope we'll always be able to turn it off.
|
| Even a default install of Raspberry Pi OS uses a composited
| window manager on the RPi 4 now.
| ori_b wrote:
| > _I think some of those animations make the desktop
| behave a little more like objects would in the real
| world._
|
| Why is this desirable? Objects in the real world have
| many inconvenient properties.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| It can make things more intuitive. If you use mental
| models people already have, they tend to pick things up
| faster. I think the point of the cube, for instance, was
| to help people keep track of multiple windows a little
| easier by making it spacial as opposed to just a list.
| Maybe it wasn't very effective in that case, but I think
| the hypothesis was sound.
| godot wrote:
| Yes! My thoughts exactly.
|
| I'm pretty desperate for an OS UI that looks like this. KDE
| comes close but still too modernized.
|
| Would love to try Serenity on a laptop some time. Anyone know
| how usable this is as a daily driver?
| CodeArtisan wrote:
| LXQt with a retro theme may do it. The project reached
| version 1.0 at the beginning of this month.
|
| https://lxqt-project.org/about/
|
| https://www.opencode.net/abgr/qtstep
| zozbot234 wrote:
| There's a well-known retro theme for GTK+ too. Works quite
| well in LXDE and Xfce.
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| It is usable only in a VM, sadly.
|
| If you like to hack around and enjoy playing Diablo 1 on
| obscure software, Serenity OS is for you :)
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| It seems to be at least somewhat capable of booting on
| metal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT-ME3PsKtc
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| That is really inspiring to see!
| squarefoot wrote:
| I can't but wonder how nice it would be if ported to ARM
| devices. If Linux can run on $15 small boards with much
| fewer resources than big PCs, this much lighter OS could
| literally fly.
| jagger27 wrote:
| People are actively working on Arm support!
|
| https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/search?q=arm&type=
| alx__ wrote:
| I feel like it's a product of the era we grew up in. Or the OS
| that made you fall in love with computers.
|
| For me that was Mac OS 8 on the first iMac :)
| bsdooby wrote:
| Absolutely
| badsectoracula wrote:
| I don't really think it is only that. My first OS was DOS and
| i used Win3.1 a lot and while i do have nostalgia for those
| two, i think Win9x was better in terms of GUI design and as
| others have mentioned, the peak was around Win2K (though not
| everything was going upwards, i still think border-on-hover
| introduced in Win98 was backwards and essentially the herald
| of featureless form-over-function modern flat design).
|
| And ever since i started using a window manager in Linux
| (somewhere in early 2000s) i really liked Window Maker's
| style even though i never used NeXTSTEP for many years (in
| fact the only time i used it i was kinda disappointed at how
| primitive it was in terms of window management compared to
| Window Maker :-P).
| topspin wrote:
| For me it's the efficiency. The 90's era Windows UI and
| applications ran productively on machines with 8MB of RAM.
| That's an enormous amount of value for what amounts half
| today's desktop CPU cache. The limited memory forced
| developers to conform to the OS provided API and resources
| (fonts, color pallets, image formats, etc.) and the result
| was small, fast, consistent applications.
|
| Today this discipline survives in mobile devices. Meanwhile,
| our desktop operating systems are festooned with a multitude
| of widget toolkits and language runtimes yielding wildly
| diverse, inconsistent and often fragile behavior and require
| 3+ orders of magnitude more memory.
|
| Aside from (usually) pretty nice font rendering, what has
| actually been achieved with all of this?
| DeathArrow wrote:
| UX means user experience, not user interface. And it does not
| have to be beautiful, but functional.
| 1_player wrote:
| If you like the Windows 98 era of UI design, I recommend you
| having a look at the GUI for the UNIX-like embedded operating
| system QNX. The care, tactility and readability of that
| interface is in my opinion unparalleled, and hidden behind a
| operating system few have heard of, and fewer even used.
|
| https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/qnx621
|
| I honestly think anything else produced since is worse than
| this, and since flat design has taken root, UIs have fallen off
| a cliff both in usability and style.
|
| I tend to get very Patrick Bateman-like when appreciating old
| UIs, the colour combination and choice of fonts on off-grey
| backgrounds, while modern interfaces just feel like there's no
| personality or warmth to them. Just flat uppercase #222 sans
| text on flat white background.
| girvo wrote:
| BlackBerry's tablet (which I loved; combined with a cheap
| Curve and a $40 AUD a month prepaid plan, I had unlimited
| internet access on both devices, super neat) was based on QNX
| if I recall correctly! Though it had its own touch UI on top
| of it.
| sigzero wrote:
| Loved it when it came out. I tried the floppy demo a few
| times. It was impressive.
| thedailyhustle wrote:
| ive seen first hand at an amazon sortation/distribution
| warehouse i worked to construct just last year used QNX for
| their automated conveyor and barcode sortation system, i
| guess since its a real-time OS? I love the UI as well and it
| was really neat to see QNX in the wild.
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| Looking at those screenshots, I can definitely see your
| point.
|
| For me, all the greys date it a little, but other than that
| it's a simple, clean, elegant and highly consistent UI!
|
| The consistency is most notable. We've lost so much of that
| in modern operating systems (mainly Windows and macOS).
|
| It feels very approachable.
|
| EDIT: Now having watched the SerenityOS video(!) all the same
| comments above apply. Really nice work.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| Looks a lot like Haiku OS.
| m0zg wrote:
| Which itself is a carbon copy of BeOS, as far as UX is
| concerned.
| bsdooby wrote:
| An operating system a want on my laptop for so long now
| (native boot)...
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Yeah, while I haven't spent enough time in Haiku[0] to get
| familiar with really it's design language, it is so
| responsive, readable, and discoverable that it forced me to
| remember all that we have lost in personal computing
| because of... I'm not entirely sure who to blame, a lot of
| people who aught to be shot out of a cannon into the sun, I
| reckon.
|
| [0] sadly it doesn't even quite meet my relatively minimal
| almost-never-used laptop use case due to the only RDP
| client that worked at all being so horrifically out of date
| that it can't understand modern RDP authentication
| mechanisms.
| waddlesplash wrote:
| > the only RDP client that worked at all being so
| horrifically out of date that it can't understand modern
| RDP authentication mechanisms.
|
| Do you mean rdesktop? Indeed it's pretty old and probably
| should be disabled, so I just did that.
|
| Did FreeRDP not work, then? It seems we had a 3-year-old
| version, so I just spent the morning updating it to the
| very latest (2.4.1). Seems to work fine here for me, I
| connected to a remote Windows machine successfully. (The
| port is missing a bunch of features, but the basics seem
| to work.)
|
| In the future you can report issues to HaikuPorts
| directly, or feel free to ping me on IRC/Matrix/XMPP.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Thanks, I will take a look when I get home. I was using
| rdesktop via BeRDP and on its own, but it choked on the
| auth portion. IIRC FreeRDP failed to launch. Also tried
| the KRDC port but it never gave me the option of using
| RDP despite its claims.
|
| I was a little annoyed at the gigantic pile of packages
| that came along with those last two options, but there's
| no need to rehash rehash that argument. I do wish there
| had been an obvious way to clean those up after removing
| the applications they supported though.
| waddlesplash wrote:
| FreeRDP is CLI-launch-only, so if you tried to start it
| via the GUI, that may have been your problem. We should
| probably rework BeRDP to use FreeRDP instead of rdesktop,
| but that's more involved.
|
| I think KRDC may be hardcoded to use "xfreerdp", so it
| won't find the Haiku variant.
|
| Yeah, "autoremove" isn't implemented unfortunately,
| nobody has gotten around to that yet. It would indeed be
| nice to have.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| I was launching it via the CLI. As I said, I'm afraid I
| do not recall the reason it failed to launch. If it does
| so now that you have updated it I will forward what
| information I can through the appropriate channels.
| walrus01 wrote:
| If you liked the simplicity of windows 2000 you'd likely do
| find with an XFCE4 desktop environment.
| sonofhans wrote:
| Wow, that's impressive work. Kudos to Andreas for building a
| community as well as a tool
|
| I'm equally amazed and horrified that they're building a web
| browser. It seems easier to build the native OS.
| queuebert wrote:
| Chrome _is_ an OS.
|
| Edit: Well, practically.
| sigzero wrote:
| Well there is "Chrome OS" so you're not wrong.
| baq wrote:
| Chrome is the new Emacs.
|
| Great OS, but the browser sucks.
| dang wrote:
| These look like the past threads so far. Others?
|
| _SerenityOS: A love letter to '90s user interfaces with a Unix-
| like core_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23911180 - July
| 2020 (1 comment)
|
| _Introduction to SerenityOS Programming_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22479132 - March 2020 (43
| comments)
|
| _Pledge() and Unveil() in SerenityOS_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22116914 - Jan 2020 (28
| comments)
|
| _CTF writeup: First published SerenityOS kernel exploit_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21918351 - Dec 2019 (2
| comments)
|
| _SerenityOS: From Zero to HTML in a Year_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21212294 - Oct 2019 (52
| comments)
|
| _Serenity OS update (August 2019) [video]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20851356 - Sept 2019 (2
| comments)
|
| _SerenityOS - a graphical Unix-like OS for x86, with 90s
| aesthetics_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19986126 - May
| 2019 (179 comments)
|
| _Serenity: x86 Unix-like operating system for IBM PC-
| compatibles_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19537807 -
| March 2019 (83 comments)
| progbits wrote:
| Not a HN thread but he posts monthly project updates very
| similar to this demo but often longer and more in-depth. If you
| liked this post you will definitely enjoy these too:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMOpZvQB55bfp6ykOLayL...
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| This is the most brilliant software project ever and this man is
| a genius messiah.
| beebeepka wrote:
| Truly monumental.
|
| What hardware do I need? Also, gaming needs to be a thing. What
| would it take to have say Quake 3 run on your OS?
| Kiro wrote:
| https://youtu.be/-rMY7Fv84eA
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| Not Andreas, but he was able to port some older games to
| Serenity.
|
| Games like DOOM, original Quake, DukeNukem and Diablo 1. You
| should be able to compile some NES emulators yourself.
|
| The OS itself runs in custom VM, but Andreas did manage to run
| it on his PC.
| anthk wrote:
| SDL/SDL2 and games/emulators/interpreters like
| Scummvm/Frotz/Mednafen should give Serenity OS a huge array
| of games.
| usaphp wrote:
| I love Andreas's YouTube channel, such a nice and relaxing stream
| of quality programming
| aledalgrande wrote:
| _did he just right click on a terminal file to open it_ (deg0deg)
| bpye wrote:
| I saw this. Does any other terminal emulator do this?
| aumerle wrote:
| Sure, many can, for example:
| https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/open_actions/
| baq wrote:
| I NEED THIS
|
| which terminal supports this _out of the box_?
| kaszanka wrote:
| Konsole does.
| aumerle wrote:
| Trivial to do in many modern terminal emulators, the most
| flexible approach being in kitty, where you can map clicks on
| filenames printed by ls to arbitrary actions:
| https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/open_actions/
| satysin wrote:
| Yes, Andreas has an _excellent_ eye for usability so SerenityOS
| and its included applications have _a lot_ of wonderful quality
| if life features such as this.
|
| I get quite jealous when I fire up the latest build of Serenity
| and see how _functional_ the whole platform is in terms of QoL
| tweaks.
| makeworld wrote:
| I paused the video and gasped at this, I had to go back and
| watch it again. It's the little things :)
| winrid wrote:
| This blew me away. Seeing that was a huge surprise. I see a
| great future for this project.
|
| Iterm2 does something similar with links, but not files printed
| from something like ls. We should fix that. :)
| ziml77 wrote:
| iTerm 2 does do that with files. You just have to cmd-click
| the filename.
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| I've been following Andreas on Youtube for quite some time. It is
| a monumental undertaking to write a completely new OS from
| scratch, and I admire his perserverence so far.
|
| He has managed to make a worthy tribute to both UNIX and old
| Windows aesthetic style. And he did it almost all alone. Of
| course, Serenity OS is now a living, breathing community, just as
| it should be.
|
| BTW, the guy has even ported DOOM, old DukeNukem and freakin'
| Diablo 1 to his OS. Mad respect to Andreas, Serenity is truly a
| work of genius.
| JasonCannon wrote:
| I especially like how he did this all after getting out of
| rehab trying to spend his time on something productive. Mad
| respect.
| Kranar wrote:
| The list of people speaking at Handmade Seattle as well as the
| topics sounds absolutely fantastic. So many conferences are
| either too corporate with presentations that are mostly flashy
| marketing, or they are technical but there's only like 2 or 3
| people giving a genuinely solid talk. This conference looks like
| it has everything, great speakers and great topics.
| akling wrote:
| Agreed, the Handmade Seattle event was fantastic! They have
| started posting recordings of this year's event to the website,
| so you'll be able to watch all the talks there soon (AFAIK) :)
| [deleted]
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| I first heard about SerenityOS via HN years ago, it's been
| incredible to watch Andreas' journey from hobby project to
| working on it full-time.
|
| His hacking sessions on youtube are also great.
| slekker wrote:
| Everything is so snappy and fast and feels lightweight, I wish
| there were Linux distributions focusing on these kind of
| aesthetics
| felixding wrote:
| There is also NEXTSPACE:
| https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace
|
| A modern replica of NeXTSTEP.
| [deleted]
| sigzero wrote:
| That's another great UI IMHO. The whole NeXTSTEP experience
| was a good one.
| grae_QED wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your project! The passion you put into It
| definitely shows! Serenity OS looks amazing, and your projects
| paradigm's align with some of my own for general purpose
| software.
|
| If I wasn't so locked into my own software ecosystem, and I had
| time to dabble with a new OS, I would absolutely try yours out.
| For the time being, I'll subscribe to your YouTube channel.
| burky wrote:
| I'm just as interested in his journey that brought him here as I
| am with this OS. So amazing!
| jbverschoor wrote:
| This seems more sane than any other thing out there
| johnwheeler wrote:
| I don't understand how they write an OS kernel, command shell,
| graphical shell, and browser in 3 years? I get there are more
| than a single person involved but it still seems very rapid.
|
| What are the catches? Is it still very immature or assuming there
| was enough user-land software (which I'm sure there is not), is
| this ready for production use?
| tuckerpo wrote:
| Andreas just gets stuff done. Watch his live content sometime.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| Unacceptable. If this is so, I quit.
| joeberon wrote:
| He has a strong philosophy of "if you want it, do it".
| Coming into the Serenity community and asking for features
| to be implemented for you is a taboo. He believes that all
| computing tasks can be done given enough dedication. This
| project is basically proof of that.
|
| Keep in mind though that he was a WebKit developer at Apple
| for many years working with full stack control of iOS from
| kernel to browser.
| alpanka wrote:
| That's the part I find most impressing.
|
| "Today we are going to add X"
|
| 2 hours later: X is added and working fine.
|
| Meanwhile, at work I could easily spend 2 hours looking for a
| GCC flag or figure out why the build script fails on arch
| after latest update
| jerrre wrote:
| At the risk of being nitpicky:
|
| Updating tools in your environment/workflow is exactly a
| thing that can lose a lot of time, often for not much
| gain[1]. One way to become very productive is to know your
| tools very well, and that would extend to not changing them
| often.
|
| [1] not much gain in productivity, but perhaps in security,
| compatibility, etc
| alpanka wrote:
| You are ignoring that we often use software created by
| other people.
|
| Raise your hand if you have ever spend an afternoon
| trying to get someone else's build scripts working.
| Wondering why make, cmake, scones and ninja are used in
| the same project...
| akling wrote:
| It's still very immature and not ready for production use.
|
| That said, you can do a heck of a lot in 3 years if you put in
| consistent time and effort towards something. :)
| eranation wrote:
| Amazing job, hope it becomes the new Linux some day, who
| knows. What did you add that might be interesting from a
| security standpoint? Things like "hardened out of the box" or
| "buffer overflow protection" or "network anomaly detection"
| or ability to plug in things that will make endpoint / server
| security easier can make it very popular!
| devsatish wrote:
| I have been following Andreas/SerenityOS for a quite a while
| now. It's extremely impressive - how he and the community
| support built an entirely new OS.
| https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/graphs/contributors
| selykg wrote:
| Heads up that the person you responded to is _actually_
| Andreas.
| tails4e wrote:
| I've watched many of your videos and love your approach to
| building complex features, building the skeleton first with
| asserts for uimplemeted code paths. However I'd love to see
| how you got started, the first early (before gui) steps of
| the kernel. Is that documented? The earliest git checkin I
| found was already a pretty capable os. Huge congrats on
| building such a positive community by the way.
| akling wrote:
| I wasn't recording anything until ~6 months into the
| project. In retrospect, it would have been nice to have!
|
| There's a bit of history about early development here:
| https://serenityos.org/happy/1st/
|
| Also, one of my earliest videos was showcasing some pre-
| YouTube builds of SerenityOS:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rveS_vwp0y8
| tails4e wrote:
| Thanks, that was a great read and watch. The progress
| made over a few weeks was immense.
|
| I didn't know about computron until you mentioned it in
| the video, so I have to ask, would serenity run under
| computtron? If so, could a serenity port of computron run
| serenity in serenity?
| cxr wrote:
| > love your approach to building complex features, building
| the skeleton first with asserts for uimplemeted code paths
|
| Write code top-down
| <https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/programming/write-code-
| top-...>:
|
| > _With bottom-up design you start with the components_
| [...] _Designing a component is a small tractable task that
| can be finished and called _done_. You're creating a
| perfect, beautiful, reusable jewel. All engineers really
| want to _do_ is write components._ [...] _At every level
| there 's pressure to do bottom-up programming. Avoid it.
| Instead, start at the top, with `main()` or its equivalent,
| and write it as if you had all the parts already written.
| Get that to look right. Stub out or hard-code the parts
| until you can get it to compile and run. Then slowly move
| your way down, keeping everything as brutally simple as you
| can. Don't write a line of code that isn't solving a
| problem you have _right now_._
| jnsie wrote:
| I prefer middle-out myself...
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Ow, that hit me right in the feels! That wonderful UI. That
| wonderful amazing UI!
|
| No light grey on dark grey text, no borderless buttons, no
| pointless 45% width margins.
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| and scrollbars that don't disappear when you try to use them!
| nesarkvechnep wrote:
| Damn, the GUI brought back sweet memories. The OS as a whole
| looks nice too.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Yes, and it's a very functional GUI: well thought, informative,
| rational, with every section put where it belongs. It comes
| from an era in which GUIs were made to solve problems. I hope
| it will never ever ever go the path that GTK took after version
| 2.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Anyone know what the driver story is with SerenityOS? Is it a
| standard Unix/Linux thing, where drivers have to be compiled
| against an unstable ABI/API? Or is it more like Windows where
| drivers are forward/backward compatible?
| haspok wrote:
| As far as I can tell, there are no drivers - this OS runs on
| QEMU only. I guess if you are lucky, you can get it to boot on
| a real system accidentally.
|
| This is the opposite of Haiku-OS, for example, which tries to
| provide at least the minimal amount of drivers, and some people
| are using it on real hardware.
|
| It was actually a really interesting decision, to concentrate
| all efforts on the fun parts of OS development, and completely
| ignore the 80% which is boring, frustrating, and requires a
| large continuous investment to stay up to date with the latest
| stuff. Looking at Haiku, they have been working on their OS for
| decades now, and still aren't in a generally usable form.
|
| I'm not sure what a QEMU-only OS is actually good for, other
| than playing around with it, but maybe I'm not the target
| audience :)
| olliej wrote:
| There are additional crazy folk working on bare metal
| support.
|
| I'm waiting for someone to start working on a custom cpu for
| it at this point :)
| bitigchi wrote:
| Haiku is actually quite usable on a wide variety of hardware
| (I use it myself on bare metal), it only needs a browser port
| such as Firefox. Falkon has been ported as of yesterday, but
| still might need fixes and stuff.
|
| In case the the graphics drivers are not supported, VESA
| and/or Framebuffer drivers come to aid, and provide a usable
| system.
| Dessesaf wrote:
| I don't see a problem with a QEMU-only OS. Serenity is
| explicity designed for personal use. It's not a headless OS
| in any way. I could see it being useful in a corporate
| environment where it's useful to have a windows host for
| business reasons, and you run your unix-like system in a
| hypervisor for development. That's how I work, and I think
| quite a few people work like this. Serenity is perfect for
| this.
|
| And obviously, nothing prevents people from writing drivers
| eventually. Andreas probably wants to run Serenity on
| whatever his hardware is eventually. But there's little point
| in doing that till we actually have a mature system that
| anyone would want to run daily.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It is good enough to run on top of type 1 hypervisors like
| Hyper-V and Xen, like all those systems powering all cloud
| flavours out there.
| daitangio wrote:
| I have downloaded Serenity and played a bit with it after HN link
| to Ars Technica article. Very nice, well written and compact: it
| runs with only 128 MB of RAM (!) and it is very very fast.
|
| Also mailing list very kindly, I asked some simple questions and
| answer was polite and wellcome.
|
| If you are studying operating system at your university course,
| it is worth a try!
| alanwreath wrote:
| Pfffft I got browser tabs that use less than that /s
| martin1975 wrote:
| I've seen his videos a few times via HN - how close is the OS to
| being able to use GCC or CLANG and say, compile all Debian
| packages.... which is one of the largest repos. I mean for this
| to really be usable it would have to be able to work well
| w/existing millions of lines of C/C++ code...
| akling wrote:
| We have a growing number of ports for those that wish to run
| 3rd party software on SerenityOS:
| https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Ports
|
| Note that the system aims to be completely free from
| dependencies, so all ports are strictly optional.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| This looks like a monumental effort from the dev. Is it really
| all 100% original code he wrote? GUI, browser, terminal, js
| interpreter, everything from scratch?!
|
| Reminds me of Terry Davis' - one of the few programmers I believe
| is "genius level" in the world.
| m0zg wrote:
| The CPU emulator looked like Valgrind judging by the output. So
| you'd have to stretch the definition of "original code" to the
| max for it to hold up.
| Kiro wrote:
| No, it's from scratch but inspired by Valgrind.
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| You can see him program it from scratch on Youtube. He
| specificaly mentioned Valgrind as an inspiration.
| [deleted]
| asddubs wrote:
| It is all original code, but he didn't write all of it, there
| are lots of contributors at this point
| eggy wrote:
| Wow! I love the mashup of unix/linux command line functionality
| with functional gui. I had been looking at Mezzano, because I
| prefer Lisp, but then I thought it would be great to implement a
| Lisp on SerenityOS with all native tie-ins to the gui and OS.
| Hmmm... So inspiring!
| narush wrote:
| Very excited to watch.
|
| If you haven't checked them out, I highly recommend checking out
| Andreas YouTube channel [1]. It's the most interesting
| programming content I've ever watched - and I feel like he's
| honestly taught me a lot about programming!
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/c/AndreasKling
| dovyski wrote:
| I want to second that. Andreas YouTube channel is a great
| source of genuine inspiration. It's enlightening to see a
| person as skilled as Andrea doing such great craftsmanship
| regarding scoping things, improvising, making mistakes, fixing
| them, making compromises to achieve goals, and more.
|
| I see Serenity OS, I upvote it :)
| akling wrote:
| Wow, thanks for the endorsement! I'm happy to have found a way
| to share my love for programming with so many people, and it's
| even cooler when it helps someone improve their skills :)
| busymom0 wrote:
| Can you share a few pointers on how one would go about
| starting with writing their own OS? I do have iOS and Android
| dev experience.
|
| How does one even go about writing something from scratch
| which runs on a particular hardware?
|
| Is this possible to do for mobile OS? Lets say writing an OS
| from scratch for mobile?
| erklik wrote:
| You should watch his videos. They shed quite a bit of light
| on SerenityOS is written, and it's given me a lot of
| insight on OSes work.
| [deleted]
| girvo wrote:
| Props for making it through rehab by the way. I also fought
| drug addiction, though in a different country to yours! I
| completely understand the drive to have a coding project as a
| part of recovery -- I've done the same, though my projects
| are much less impressive than yours :)
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| Seconded. Dude is super positive and a hacker in the OG sense
| of the word. I watched him port Diablo to serenity in like an
| hour. Mindblowing. Quite frankly his ability is almost
| intimidating.
| Retr0id wrote:
| One thing that regularly bothers me about Linux, is how janky it
| is to parse fields out of the procfs. Using JSON makes so much
| more sense!
| sneak wrote:
| You could make a fuse file system that reads /proc and provides
| /procjson
|
| Alternately you could make a kernel module that provides
| /proc/js/ or /proc/whatever.json alongside /proc/whatever.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Or you could write a library that parses /proc into JSON, and
| everyone could include it if they want it.
| meltedcapacitor wrote:
| Has SerenityOS got a setting for the location of the "light"
| source?
|
| Back in the days there was no good explanation for users who
| asked how to change that. Windows95 and clones were all hardcoded
| with a top left light source producing the buttons' shadows!
| clone1018 wrote:
| I don't have anything profound to say, but I love alternative
| OSes like SerenityOS, and I wish the world had more of them.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| The one I usually recommend for people to check out is Haiku
| OS. I see diversity as a positive, and hope that all these OSes
| succeed at their goals.
| akling wrote:
| The more the merrier! And I would love to see more
| alternative browser engines as well :^)
| emptyparadise wrote:
| An operating system for a better world...
| sdwvit wrote:
| That is the cool demo Andreas worked for some time recently!
| mynameismon wrote:
| Is it just me or do some people find the grey theme (yielding the
| nostalgic UI) off-putting?
| Narishma wrote:
| I find it beautiful.
| losvedir wrote:
| Holy moly this is incredible! I'm not usually one to watch videos
| here, but this one was worth it (and pretty short).
|
| I'm amazed that he built a whole new browser to go with his OS.
| akling wrote:
| Glad you enjoyed the video!
|
| Just to be clear, while I started the project, it's since been
| hacked on by hundreds of people (we're well over 500
| contributors on GitHub) and it's by no means a solo project
| anymore! https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity
| throwawaysea wrote:
| If I understand correctly, this one person and a small team of
| volunteers (?) built not only the core operating system from
| scratch but also the user interface and also apps like the
| browser? How is that possible? I would think this type of thing
| needs hundreds of engineers.
| mythz wrote:
| There's lots of other things like its Hack Studio IDE [1], GML
| GUI Markup language and GML Playground [2], an x86 User Space
| Emulator [3].
|
| I highly recommend checking out his YouTube channel [4] where
| he records doing a lot of this stuff in real-time. Also pretty
| amazing that most of this was done on the side after this full-
| time job, up until a few months ago where he's been able to
| quit to focus full-time on SerenityOS from GitHub Sponsorships
| [5].
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRGu8DVrlHQ
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QYBvTy9QKE
|
| [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYWMLiZKB-Y
|
| [4] https://www.youtube.com/c/AndreasKling/videos
|
| [5] https://github.com/sponsors/awesomekling
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| A lot of effort, but besides the nostalgia effect I don't see how
| anyone could take something like this seriously for everyday use.
| After using a multitude of window managers on Linux, it just
| doesn't make much sense to me to go backwards rather than
| forwards.
| joeberon wrote:
| The benefit is that you basically have full control over the
| entire OS. If a modern software on linux wants to fix a bug
| caused by the windowing system, they cannot just go in and do a
| straightforward PR on it without learning that entire community
| and vast project. In Serenity, most of it can be understood by
| most programmers. I personally fixed a bug in the volume applet
| that required adding a new IPC message to the windowing system.
| This kind of full stack control is rarely seen in an open
| source context, and so it has a lot of potential.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It isn't yet another POSIX clone, that is the main difference
| from Linux right there.
| plorntus wrote:
| It's not for actual everyday use (afaik it never will be
| either), it's built for those that want to build and explore a
| from scratch OS.
| bdash wrote:
| Awesome to see that you're doing well, Andreas!
| akling wrote:
| Hi bdash! Great to see you here, and I hope life is going well
| for you too :)
| _daver wrote:
| This is a really cool project and I want to see it succeed. I
| realize the FAQ states "There is no plan". That aside, are there
| any longer-term goals for the project or things they want to
| support in the future?
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| Hey everyone! I'm the organizer for Handmade Seattle. It was a
| pleasure hosting SerenityOS, as Andreas is an inspiration to us.
|
| If I may plug, note we are 100% indie and upload presentations
| for free. We have a newsletter [0] but since HN loves RSS we have
| that setup as well [1].
|
| [0] https://media.handmade-seattle.com/subscribe
|
| [1] https://media.handmade-seattle.com/rss
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