Linked by J. Scott Edwards on Fri 17th Dec 2004 18:51 UTC
Every hard-core OS aficionado has done it: Laid out a grand scheme for creating the perfect OS. Taking all the best features and attributes from the OSes we love, and making sure to assiduously avoid the pitfalls of the OSes we don't. Maybe our goals were modest, and we just wanted a slightly tweaked version of an existing OS. But sometimes we're feeling ambitious, and we have large, creative ideas for revolutionizing computing. Long-time OSNews reader and contributor J. Scott Edwards just couldn't help himself, and he has set about to not only plan, but to try to build his dream OS.
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so i dont know where to start.
still, the idea of building it as a kind of virtual machine iliminates your endian problem in a way as the virtual machine would deal with that. allso the virtual machine can then be run on top of any other os...
the everything as a object with defined inputs and outputs that you can then link together (either command or visualy) basicly takes the commandline idea from unix into a visual enviroment. small parts that together become a bigger whole.
i allso like the idea of have the state of the program contiualy saved to disk. still, its a bit of a performance hit. but outside of gameing there is few taskes these days that realy task the system. most of the cpu time is spent waiting for user input anyways.
the seperation of gui and app is allso interesting. this would allow for anyone to, in theory, write their own desktop. tailoring to how they work. i have been thinking about a similar system ever since i tested that haystack project. it would allow me to call up a image manipulation app when handleing any graphical object, anywhere in the os.
folders become basicly just lists of objects, and the same object can be in many lists (kinda like the way you can link the same object to many places in the filesystem in unix). in fact now that i think about it, this is basicly unix. with a microkernel (object drivers), and a database based filesystem (should be simple enough, but i would rather wrap it around a flat file system in case of system recovery. kinda like how ext3 is ext2 with a journal, and can be mounted as ext2 if needed. you mount it with the database loaded or not). all inputs and outputs of the apps must be datastreams however (unless its sound of imagery it should be ascii or unicode) and the guis must be able to interpet these datastreams. hmm, why on earth am i thinking tcl/tk here? allso, it kinda reminds me of kparts...
get in contact with freedesktop.org and start work on a desktop standard for unhooking the gui from the base app core and the needed datastreams. this is basicly the only thing needed (outside of the database-like filesystem) to bring your ideas to most existing unix equivalent os's...
*rant off*