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Ask HN: How to experiment with a new OS approach?
2 points by Timothee 5 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments
This week, Daylight Computer announced what they’ve been working on. The distraction-free approach reminded me of the Mercury OS concept from 2019: https://www.mercuryos.com/architecture

And that made me wonder: how would one experiment with that kind of concepts?

There are of course plenty of open-source OSes but that seems like a daunting task to start from that. (to me at least)

Maybe a simple app (even a web app) that takes over the whole screen to explore ideas?

How would you approach this? What already exists in this area?

Thanks!




Had a quick look at Mercury OS, to me it looks like a mock-up, not an implementation.

For me the term "OS" refers something along the lines of Linux, BSD, Minix, Haiku-OS, Minix, Plan9, etc. For each of these a large amount of effort has been, and continues to be, expended on optimizing for CPU architecture, device drivers, window managers, etc.

If you are more interested in operating environments and experimenting with presentation and manipulation concepts, then as you have hinted, using the web browser environment as a virtual machine is a far more productive approach to trying out different concepts without massive amounts of very low level programming.

I rather like the look of Self and Smalltalk environments. Have toyed with some similar concepts running in a browser in full-screen and/or kiosk modes.


Ah that’s a great point! Yes, I was really talking about the presentation aspect only. And indeed how to get to experiment with it in the cheapest way.

I now realize the term I was looking for was “desktop environment”. Somehow it completely skipped my mind.




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