
The Unleashed Operating System - colinprince
http://unleashed-os.org/
======
erikb
These are not goals. Every OS in the world has contributions and releases.
Linux has the goal to be pragmatic, BSDs have the goal to be technically
perfect in a certain area, Windows had the goal to be on every desktop
computer in the world and more, and OSX has the goal to be smooth and sharp.

If your highest goal is that someone contributes code to your OS why would
anybody use it? Think about htat question and you might find your actual goal.
If you can't find a goal, then maybe the existing OSes are sufficient. Choose
one, live with it, and develop something else on top that doesn't have a
satisfiable alternative yet.

~~~
rwmj
If you've ever tried to contribute something to the Linux kernel you'd know
it's not an easy process. They say that they want to "encourage new
contributors to repeatedly contribute". So in this respect it is very
different from the Linux kernel.

Now I will admit this is going to be tricky. How do you dissuade junk
contributions or misfeatures but at the same time encourage contributions?
They may end up with an overall declining quality which kills off other goals
such as user adoption.

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linuxftw
> If you've ever tried to contribute something to the Linux kernel you'd know
> it's not an easy process. They say that they want to "encourage new
> contributors to repeatedly contribute". So in this respect it is very
> different from the Linux kernel.

I have contributed a small 1-time change to the Linux kernel. It was
relatively easy and straight forward; I sent my first patch to the wrong list,
but the maintainers helpfully corrected me.

The difficult part is finding _what_ to contribute, IMO.

~~~
rwmj
I think you're forgetting the large learning curve to get to that point. You
learned how to build the kernel, git, the kernel style guide, signed-off-bys,
checkpatch, get-maintainer and finally running git-email. And there's the
assumption that you knew what to change and how to fix it, but most kernel
error messages are opaque - it can often be impossible to find out why a
system call returns -EINVAL or where an error message comes from.

And that's just for a small change. Large and/or controversial changes often
involve multiple rounds of review and can take (literally) years to get
upstream. I'm sometimes amazed when I read LWN about how long it has taken for
features to get integrated into the kernel.

I don't know what Unleashed OS is planning but it seems obvious we could make
this a whole lot simpler.

~~~
neuromantik8086
> I think you're forgetting the large learning curve to get to that point.

Openness in general requires a large learning curve, and I think it's a
mistake for any open source project to be marketing itself as a democratic
entity that literally anyone can contribute to. If anything, open source is
more like a technocratic government (ergo the "Benevolent Dictator For Life"
position in a project). Even Wikipedia is a huge pain in the ass to add to at
this point.

I've noticed a similar phenomenon with the open science movement, where
scientists publicly release their data. Unsurprisingly, few folks from the
general public usually work with open data with the necessary assumptions to
draw valid conclusions from it. Other scientists, as insiders who've built up
decades worth of expertise in statistics and other analytical techniques (at
least in theory; in practice not always) are usually the only people who have
the ability to fully milk the data for what it's worth. Science, however, is
possibly even slower and more political than linux kernel development,
although I don't have enough knowledge to make a proper comparison.

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krylon
"we care about more than just that the code works — we want code we can (for
the most part) be proud of."

I am not sure if I would use it, but I like this attitude!

~~~
pecg
Like the OpenBSD developers, a posture much needed these days.

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siteshwar
> Unleashed is an operating system fork of illumos,

Can someone explain why it was forked ?

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snw
Probably someone from the unleashed project can give a better answer, but my
understanding is mostly unhappiness about the illumos contribution process.

The illumos RTI (request to integrate) process is designed to ensure a certain
quality of contributions. The downside of this is that it sometimes takes a
long time to contribute a change.

For illumos there is also pretty high expectation of backwards compatibility.
What unleashed now offers is a place to do more radical changes and quickly
iterate on new ideas.

While the small illumos community is already pretty fragmented my personal
hope is that in the future work done by both projects keeps getting merged
from time to time. Maybe this also serves as a wakeup call to the illumos
project to make some improvements to the contribution process itself.

~~~
neuromantik8086
Perhaps unleashed could be to illumos what fedora is to rhel/centos?

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fotcorn
The first goal is to make contribution easy, but I can't find any
documentation on how to do this.

A public GitLab instance where everyone could submit pull requests would be
really cool (or just host it on GitHub).

~~~
b2ccb2
It's in the docs folder of the public git repo:

[http://repo.or.cz/unleashed.git/blob/HEAD:/docs/illumos-
refu...](http://repo.or.cz/unleashed.git/blob/HEAD:/docs/illumos-
refugees.md#l37)

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drngdds
With no snarkiness intended, why would I want to use this? Is it just for
people who want an OS to contribute to for fun? The only features really
mentioned are "it's not horrifically legacy" and "it's easy to contribute to".

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improv32
How will Unleashed compare to say FreeBSD? Better desktop support?

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jpttsn
Is it just me or is the font aligned to justify and the margins set to zero?

Is this an operating system for people who don’t care to make a good first
impression?

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dokem
Maybe it's an OS for people who like systems and not CSS?

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udp
Well, they’ve used CSS to do that. If they’d just left it alone it would have
been fine.

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cloudive
i'd like an alternative to linux and BSD that has better RISC compatibility

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krylon
What exactly do you mean by that? Both the Linux kernel and several of the BSD
systems run on multiple RISC achitectures.

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tonysdg
Maybe a typo for RISC-V? Still doesn't make a lot of sense though...

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yjftsjthsd-h
Yeah, IIRC FreeBSD supports riscv and Fedora actually ships a full image for
it.

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cestith
[https://riscv.org/software-status/#operating-
systems](https://riscv.org/software-status/#operating-systems)

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neuromantik8086
[https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

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lostmsu
Yes, but why?

~~~
jarenhavell
Developers.
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs)

