[lacampbell]

I love the idea of smaller more logical operating systems. I am surprised that in the era of giant tech companies with top programmers and a lot of resources the most commercially viable strategy is still "try and paper over the complexities of linux" instead of starting something smaller and more modern.

[jstewartmobile]

When the CPU's developer manual is 2198 pages and still growing, any option other than starting with Linux and trying to keep up (i.e. VT, SGX, TPM, GPU, etc) will be extremely costly.

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents...

These things like Oberon and Inferno are from a more innocent era of computing.

[guidoism]

I think that Intel’s cpu complexity (and arm and for that matter RISC v CPUs) is that they are designed to speed up existing software. Software that was written 50 years ago on simpler machines. Starting from scratch is not as complex as you might think if running existing software at “native” speed isn’t a requirement.

[majewsky]

> starting something smaller and more modern

Where do you draw the line? Do you throw away Linux and write your own OS, which is bound to grow to the same level of complexity because it needs to deal with hardware complexity? Or do you throw away the existing hardware as well and start from silicon? Maybe even reboot the computing stack on an entirely different type of hardware?

[cultofmetatron]

I would be so down for a risc-V laptop running redox

[moron4hire]

Why not? Apple runs their own chips in the iPad and iPhone, with their own OS. Seems to be working out for them.

[pushpop]

The problem of starting again becomes harder with each passing year because you have more hardware to support, more complicated software that needs porting and higher expectations from users about what a modern OS should behave like.

It’s a similar problem with creating new web browser rendering engines.

[__d]

A browser engine is, I think, the main impediment to most non-mainstream operating systems being "useful" in a day-to-day sense.

It's just a massive amount of work, with literally millions of lines of code required, whereas a basic operating system is easily under 100k SLOC.

Plan9 and Inferno suffer from this. Haiku suffers from this. And Oberon is has the same issue.

[1wd]

Oberon actually has a browser. At least the Bluebottle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluebottle_OS) variant does: https://bbos.org/xref/WebBrowser.Mod.html

[moron4hire]

I've been considering doing this for Snapdragon SOCs. I'd probably start with the 855 or the 8cx and not worry about any backwards compatibility with anything other than the latest and greatest hardware.