Josh On Design

One of my original IdealOS blog posts from 2017 showed up on the front page of Hackernews the other day (comments here). This got me thinking about IdealOS again. I haven’t worked on it in a couple of years, but as I read through the comments and links to articles by people with similar ideas, I came to a realization. I am still working on it. Maybe not directly, but I’m still exploring ideas that are needed to build IdealOS. So with that in mind let’s take a look at what I’ve been working on lately.

Yeah, it’s been a while, but not forgotten! In between moving homes and jobs and pets I found to do a new release of my IdealOS prototype. And not just a new release, but an actual full rewrite! Let’s take a look at what’s new in IdealOS Mark 6!

After a few weeks long sprint I’ve got another build ready for Ideal OS. Visually it’s starting to come together nicely. Check it out.

It's been a whole lot of work to get to Mark 4 of Ideal OS. My real goal for this sprint was to have something that at least visually looks like a real operating system. What do you think?

As I mentioned before I’ve gone back to working on the bottom half of Ideal OS. So far I’ve got a messaging protocol, a central server, a few tiny apps, and three different display server implementations. The version I’m calling Mark 3 looks like this:

I've paused my work on Filament for a while to go back and do some more research into low level graphics for IdealOS. As part of that I wanted to emulate a Raspberry Pi on my Mac. The short version is: yes it can be done but it's useless for graphics.

This is the first 360 video test with Jesse. It might make you dizzy.

Twitter user ekse has graciously translated this blog to Chinese. Thanks! TL;DR: By the end of this essay I hope to convince you of the following facts. First, that modern desktop operating systems are anything but. They are bloated, slow, and layered with legacy cruft that still functions only thanks to Moore's Law. Second, that innovation in desktop operating systems stopped about 15 years ago and the major players are unlikely to heavily invest in them again. And finally, I hope to convince you that we can and should start over from scratch, learning the lessons of the past.

In the first two (1, 2 ) installments of this essay I covered overall system design, the window manager, and applications. I talked about how the user will communicate with the system, but I haven’t discussed much about how the system communicates back to the user. This brings us to the next big problem of today’s operating systems: notifications and concentration.

In the future touch interfaces will take over most computing tasks but 10% of people will still need ‘full general purpose computers’. We can’t let the interface stagnate. This white paper represents a decade of my thinking on what is wrong with desktop style operating systems (WIMP) style and proposed solutions. PCs are not obsolete. They just need improvements to become ‘workstations’ again.

Note: Parts II and III are up now.