I see a lot of text-editing environments geared towards "distraction-free, focused editing" but not a lot of innovation on an OS focused on the same experience. I would like to see such a "writing OS" that boots to a text editor in less than a second. Maybe this OS is a candidate?
The hardware compatibility list shows a promising number of machines ( http://www.menuetos.net/hwc.txt ). If you have a spare one, you could try and report. There is a chance that you will achieve a very fast boot time.
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AROS (Amiga) could reboot in ~7s, ~15yrs ago. And you can do more than you can with MenuetOS. Again, today you will probably break that record.
Last time I ran it, Lakka (a Linux disto for Retroach emulation appliances) booted in 5s or less on an RPi2, to a usable graphical menu, complete with particle effects or whatever if you have that stuff enabled.
1.44 MB floppy read times might prevent sub-5-second boots to a GUI, though. I can’t really remember how fast things like that booted from a floppy, anymore.
I used to have a setup where I'd boot the Linux-hosted version of AROS (so not nearly the same as booting from scratch certainly) straight into FrexxEd, and it started AROS + FrexxEd faster than my Emacs install started on the same box...
Anyway: I thought I have here a laptop I have to initialize, maybe I will install IcarOS on it as soon as I will have the time. So, we will see how it behaves on bare metal.
Faster than you can say "what are boot times like" from what I remember.
But it's not a practically usable OS, it's more like a study in how far you can get with pure assembly. Though if a text editor is really all you want, it might be good enough.
I don't know if much innovation is really required, honestly. You probably won't find what you're looking for with Mac/Windows, but if you run a tiling window manager like i3 on Linux you'll pretty much just see a clock, some system stats, and whatever applications you have open on the screen. You can pretty easily configure the bottom bar to remove the superfluous system stats, or even the clock if you want.
Is that the kind of experience you'd look for in a distraction-free OS? If not I'd be interested to hear your ideas - I use i3 for work but manage to distract myself anyway because I always have a web browser open.
If you truly want focused you don't even need a window manager, you aren't even forced to run x11 or wayland but if so just put your favorite text editor desktop file in /usr/share/xsessions is enough.
When I used it (and Kolibri, Floppix, and QNXdemo) in the mid-2000s it was mostly down to the speed of the floppy drive. So about the same as loading Windows 10 from a conventional (spinning rust) hard drive.
Haven't tested recently, but FreeDOS (or SvarDOS) boots in a couple of seconds. The kernel is ridiculously minimal. From there, you could launch a text editor via autoexec.bat and voila. It is a fun system, too.
Years ago, I found a bootable USB project on Github with a tiny custom Linux kernel that only launched vi. IIRC, my computer's fan was always running full speed with it, though.
Maybe with heavy hacking, but not ready-made, at least that I’ve found. Certainly don’t seem to be any distros (in the casual searching I do periodically) that focus on 1-second boot times out of the box.
I gave it a try many years ago and its speed was jawdropping. Too bad that a port to ARM would require a complete rewrite; those cheaper lower end *Pi-like embedded boards seem just the perfect platforms to take advantage of such a small and fast OS.
For ARM32, RISC OS is probably the closest to the value proposition offered by Menuet, albeit with a decent amount of high level code and a lot more support from developers for applications, languages, and games.
If I'm not mistaken, both are written in FASM (Flat Assembler). And unfortunately FASM won't run in recent MacOSes because it's a 32-bit app. No problem with Windows/Linux, though.
The code was GPL, but kolibri did replace copyright headers and that was Ville's main gripe. Whether or not that breaks the GPL, I cannot say (they kept his name in the license file).
Ville, in response to who forked it: "Coders from Ukraine's eastern neighbor. And closed source seems to be a quite good way of getting rid of their forum spamming (to use a polite expression)."
It's kinda difficult to believe that the copyright headers were the core of the issue to close down the project. They also talk about spamming the forums. There must have been other major disagreements / antipathy.
If BSD had to split apart their additions with the original unix code, then that means copyright headers should be avoided/obsoleted and only a vcs based historical viewing (who committed what) should be allowed. Since whatever anybody writes contains a copyright itself.
> KolibriOS has forked off from MenuetOS in 2004, and is run under independent development since then. All our code is open-source, with the majority of the code released under GPLv2 license.
This was epic! I used to bring this to school on a floppy and was absolutely shocked at the quality of the experience after booting. It's a pretty full featured desktop environment.
Amazing this is still around! I remember playing with this back when I was playing with toy kernel development as a teenager back in the mid 2000s! It was pretty amazing to see even back then given how out of my depth I was with the little bits of assembler you needed to get to set things up (protected mode etc.) before jumping to the C entry point!
IJS before all those “extra layers” in operating systems we used to do stuff like escalate privilege to admin using POKE in BASIC. (OS: Oasis, later ‘c/os’ a Z80 multiuser os from the mid-80s)
This was so small back in the day (one floppy I believe), that I proposed it for firmware or boot manager before EFI became ubiquitous or coreboot came along.
I see a lot of text-editing environments geared towards "distraction-free, focused editing" but not a lot of innovation on an OS focused on the same experience. I would like to see such a "writing OS" that boots to a text editor in less than a second. Maybe this OS is a candidate?