skiftOS is a hobby operating system built for learning and for fun targeting the x86 platform. It features a kernel named hjert, a graphical user interface with a compositing window manager, and familiar UNIX utilities.
This looks remarkably advanced for a “hobby operating system”, and can be run in both Qemu and VirtualBox. This one is definitely worth a virtual boot. The code is licensed under the MIT license and available on GitHub.
Nice hobby project. A good chunk of OS functionality and userland was ripped from frameworks which gives things a samey functionality and samey look but it’s an achievement getting this far.
> A good chunk of OS functionality and userland was ripped from frameworks
Was it? Which ones?
The only obvious I could find is the use of Googles “Material Design” for the GUI elements. But the underlying UI lib is not based on anything familiar, like qt or gnome, but custom.
There are not too many fancy new ideas or concepts, and of course it reuses many things from posix/unix – but other than that it is a new and clean implementation.
The other famous hoppy project from a coder in Finland has become very cluttered and complicated over the years…
Maybe it is time for a hobby project from Belgium.
Oops. My mistake. Blame it on misunderstanding their landing page documentation and name clashes with an external project. I had a look at the source in case I was misreading things. It seems the source only has a couple of external components: Zlib and a PNG filter. Not a huge scandal.
Not a fan of Unix/Linux but that’s my bias.
I have no thoughts really but agree small simple and clean is nice.
If you like this kind of hobby OS, I think you will find the SerenityOS very interesting. It is in a more advanced stage than skiftOS. The main OS author has a youtube channel where he is displaying the actual programming.
Well – but SerenityOS hat an absolute terrible look and feel – and that is on purpose:
“SerenityOS is a love letter to ’90s user interfaces”
SkiftOS is already a much better approach in GUI design and ist own “libwidget” seems nice and clean.
Serenity’s GUI design is beautiful. SkiftOS is fugly.
I know : you can turn the argument around.
That is what I did in the first place, with SerenityOS creators claim, to provide a good user interface.
But how can we bring some objectivity to that? Is is all just “art” and therefor in the eye of the beholder?
I believe 90s GUIs were to a high degree a result of very limited “screen estate”.
With a rather limited number of pixels one had to cramp things closely together – white space was not a proper way to separate things but lines were …
Yes you can deliver all that Information by cramping things into little boxes, use narrow lines, and so on… but the separating elements (lines, boxes, colors) add a lot of visual noise to the scenery.
As with allots anything, your mind gets used to it and after a while you probably will start preferring the familiar look to any different or new – while a person with less experience will have a clear preference of the new one (at least in this case).
I should be as biased as any one, who started computing in the 80s and programed and worked with computers through the 90s until today.
But on the other hand I was always unsatisfied with most UIs and tried to improve them, studied design principles and worked with users and visual artists …
Today “flatness” and “cleanness” is actually going a little bit too far in Win10, Android and iOS/macOS and it will probably swing back to some more visual clues – but overall modern GUI designs are on the right path in terms of usability and visual pleasing appearance for >90% of the users.
Computer screens are not magazines… While underlying design principles may be shared I agree there has been too much conflation and divergence. It’s not too different with fine art versus Instagram or a real artist versus programmer art. You also have interactivity versus the mere viewing. A danger with new people is because they don’t know any different think what is on offer is the best which isn’t always so. Ditto older people who a century ago would have been used to extremely ornate but cluttered newspapers. The web is a mixture of bad design and over design. The useability is better in some ways but worse in others when comparing computer to print.
Windows 10 is certainly going too far but Microsoft also threw out their HCI guidelines for “Soccor Mom” and “hipster” marketing, fired their entire technical writing team, ditched their QA, and still haven’t fixed their awful help file system and their online documentation and update system is going from bad to worse.
I wonder when ARM will become a go to platform for newly established hobby OSes. Given it takes a lone dev ~ a decade to bring an os to phase where it’s interesting for mere mortals one should expect the first fruits targetting say RPi start showing up.
https://ultibo.org
https://accentual.com/bmc64/
https://jsandler18.github.io
(I am sure there are more out there)
Problem of ARM is the variety of ISAs variance (ARMv6, ARMv7, ARMv8) that cannot run the same binary easily. And even the more variety of SOCs (startup, interfaces, …)