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Hey the reason behind my username! To add something useful, OSes are the one area where reinventing the wheel leads to a lot of innovation. It's a complete st

Hey the reason behind my username! To add something useful, OSes are the one area where reinventing the wheel leads to a lot of innovation. It's a complete strip down and an opportunity to change or do things that previously had a lot of friction due to the amount of change that would occur.

mintplant 1y ago
What was Cartwheel Linux? A quick search doesn't turn up anything related.
achierius 1y ago
What makes you say "the one area"? There are plenty of areas that have enough development friction / inertia such that the same principle applies. Even generally, I think the reason why people caution against reinventing the wheel isn't because it prevents innovation, but because it wastes time / incurs additional risk.
- apfsx 1y ago
  I agree with you. When I read that my first thought was "the one area"? Personally I think its the complete opposite, like really strongly. like really really strongly. I'm certain for at least 10 years now, once a week I think "I miss old desktop operating systems". Any of them. 7,vista,xp. snow leopard,leopard,tiger. I even stopped using Ubuntu when it went from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 and other options at that time were pretty bad so I ended up getting back into mac's for my home desktop. I still use all 3 daily, but hate all of them.
criddell 1y ago
> OSes are the one area where reinventing the wheel leads to a lot of innovation To me, it seems like the opposite is true. Operating systems feel like a solved problem. What are some of the big innovations of recent times?
- positron26 1y ago
  On the DE, we just struggle with polish. This is paradoxically both an issue of not enough fruitful innovation and not enough maturity of good innovations that happen and take forever to be adopted. As far as the actual OS, the new sheaves and barns thing in Linux is neat. We need innovation in RAM compression and swapping to handle bursty desktop memory needs better. The main problem, and the one I'm trying to solve, is that as a software engineer, you have little incentive to make something that millions of people will use on the Linux desktop unless you have some other downstream monetization plan. You will have tons of users who have questions, not code contributions. To enable users to better organize into their own support structures and to make non-code contributions, I'm building PrizeForge.
- wraptile 1y ago
  > Operating systems feel like a solved problem Even desktop environment is not solved. I'm typing this from a relatively new metod of displaying windows - a scrolling window manager (e.g. Karousel [1] for KDE). It just piles new windows to the right and it infinitely scrolls horizontally. This seems like a minor feature but changes how you use the desktop entirely and required a lot of new features at operating system level to enable this. I wouldn't go back to a desktop without this. The immutable systems like NixOS [2] have been an absolute game changer as well. Some parts are harder but having an ability to always roll back and the safety of immutability really make your professional environment so much easier to maintain and understand. No more secrets, not more "I set something for one project at system level and now years later I forgot and now something doesn't work". I've been on linux desktop exclusively for almost 15 years now and it has never been as much fun as it is today! 1 - https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel 2 - https://nixos.org/ https://nixos.org/
  - amelius 1y ago
    Am I the only one who thinks that DBus and XDG are causing a lot of problems? I would love to see a complete overhaul of those. In my opinion, if I type "xeyes" and it works (the app shows on my screen), then I should be able to start any other X11 application. However, gnome-terminal behaves differently. I don't know why precisely, but using dbus-launch sometimes works. It is a very annoying issue. A modern Linux desktop system feels like it's microservices connected by duct-tape, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.
amelius 1y ago
Not really, unless you rewrite the kernel too. Security in Linux needs a complete makeover, where applications are not trusted as they are now.
- quotemstr 1y ago
  > applications are not trusted as they are now. Agreed, but... > rewrite the kernel Why would you do that? The kernel already has all the tools you need for isolating apps from each other. It's up to userspace to use these tools.
  - amelius 1y ago
    Because you don't bolt security on top of an existing system. You include it in the design of the system.
    - quotemstr 1y ago
      Can you please include enough technical details to have a discussion instead of making assertions so broad that they can't even be wrong?
      - amelius 1y ago
        It's more a matter of best practices than technical details. You can build a skyscraper on top of the foundations of a shed, and the kernel devs have done an amazing job at that, but at some point you gotta conclude that maybe it is better to start from scratch with a new design. And security is a good enough reason.

mintplant 1y ago

What was Cartwheel Linux? A quick search doesn't turn up anything related.

achierius 1y ago

What makes you say "the one area"? There are plenty of areas that have enough development friction / inertia such that the same principle applies. Even generally, I think the reason why people caution against reinventing the wheel isn't because it prevents innovation, but because it wastes time / incurs additional risk.

apfsx 1y ago
I agree with you. When I read that my first thought was "the one area"? Personally I think its the complete opposite, like really strongly. like really really strongly. I'm certain for at least 10 years now, once a week I think "I miss old desktop operating systems". Any of them. 7,vista,xp. snow leopard,leopard,tiger. I even stopped using Ubuntu when it went from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 and other options at that time were pretty bad so I ended up getting back into mac's for my home desktop. I still use all 3 daily, but hate all of them.

criddell 1y ago

> OSes are the one area where reinventing the wheel leads to a lot of innovation To me, it seems like the opposite is true. Operating systems feel like a solved problem. What are some of the big innovations of recent times?

positron26 1y ago
On the DE, we just struggle with polish. This is paradoxically both an issue of not enough fruitful innovation and not enough maturity of good innovations that happen and take forever to be adopted. As far as the actual OS, the new sheaves and barns thing in Linux is neat. We need innovation in RAM compression and swapping to handle bursty desktop memory needs better. The main problem, and the one I'm trying to solve, is that as a software engineer, you have little incentive to make something that millions of people will use on the Linux desktop unless you have some other downstream monetization plan. You will have tons of users who have questions, not code contributions. To enable users to better organize into their own support structures and to make non-code contributions, I'm building PrizeForge.
wraptile 1y ago
> Operating systems feel like a solved problem Even desktop environment is not solved. I'm typing this from a relatively new metod of displaying windows - a scrolling window manager (e.g. Karousel [1] for KDE). It just piles new windows to the right and it infinitely scrolls horizontally. This seems like a minor feature but changes how you use the desktop entirely and required a lot of new features at operating system level to enable this. I wouldn't go back to a desktop without this. The immutable systems like NixOS [2] have been an absolute game changer as well. Some parts are harder but having an ability to always roll back and the safety of immutability really make your professional environment so much easier to maintain and understand. No more secrets, not more "I set something for one project at system level and now years later I forgot and now something doesn't work". I've been on linux desktop exclusively for almost 15 years now and it has never been as much fun as it is today! 1 - https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel 2 - https://nixos.org/ https://nixos.org/
- amelius 1y ago
  Am I the only one who thinks that DBus and XDG are causing a lot of problems? I would love to see a complete overhaul of those. In my opinion, if I type "xeyes" and it works (the app shows on my screen), then I should be able to start any other X11 application. However, gnome-terminal behaves differently. I don't know why precisely, but using dbus-launch sometimes works. It is a very annoying issue. A modern Linux desktop system feels like it's microservices connected by duct-tape, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.

amelius 1y ago

Not really, unless you rewrite the kernel too. Security in Linux needs a complete makeover, where applications are not trusted as they are now.

quotemstr 1y ago
> applications are not trusted as they are now. Agreed, but... > rewrite the kernel Why would you do that? The kernel already has all the tools you need for isolating apps from each other. It's up to userspace to use these tools.
- amelius 1y ago
  Because you don't bolt security on top of an existing system. You include it in the design of the system.
  - quotemstr 1y ago
    Can you please include enough technical details to have a discussion instead of making assertions so broad that they can't even be wrong?
    - amelius 1y ago
      It's more a matter of best practices than technical details. You can build a skyscraper on top of the foundations of a shed, and the kernel devs have done an amazing job at that, but at some point you gotta conclude that maybe it is better to start from scratch with a new design. And security is a good enough reason.