[new4thaccount]

An interesting question, but you already know the answer to it :).

Linux has a lot of users giving it time and money and even it struggles with driver and other support. There are other desktop projects out there that take Amiga and BeOS and have a decent OS overall, but nobody can use them as serious daily drivers for work (ok, most of us can't). I think there is a lot of room for improvement here, but it's a massive project and so far nothing can touch those big three with the exception of BSD, which is the obvious 4th place I think.

What I really want is a billion dollars to have a brand new Smalltalk or Lisp machine built with great hardware support, graphics, and something like Mathematica builtin to it. Rebol/Red would also be good here.

[PurpleHen]

Hi,

I totally agree with your post. The issue with lacking drivers are often lacking specs (mostly for GPUs) so its not always the fault of the developer/project. I'm contributing code to Red myself and actually working on a PoC Kernel/OS implemented in Red/System. Its architecture will be an exoKernel/paraKernel. You would be able to directly boot into your IDE or app just like in the good old C64/Amiga (Game mode) days. What I really want to have is running Red/OS on the Mill CPU.

[new4thaccount]

First of all, thank you for your work. Since I don't contribute myself, I'm a bit of a parasite :)

Second, I'm salivating at the prospect of booting into a Red terminal directly on hardware. Would I be able to use the View DSL for graphics, or just the text parts of the console?

Best of luck! Also, I'd love to hear more details.

[PurpleHen]

Just keep using it and provide feedback :)

Yes, that's the plan, having full view DSL features. The issues are GPU drivers, as you don't get any specs from the manufacturers, so it will either be a software renderer or using a VGA/SVGA backend. An exoKernel/paraKernel is only securely multiplexing the resources. Everything happens in user-space (memory allocations, scheduling, etc.), so you can theoretically run every app from every OS at the same time (if you provide a libOS being able to handle the API calls of the specific OS). You would be able to run only one single app or multiple ones. The OS is just another application so you can boot into an OS or an application itself, running on bare-metal.

[new4thaccount]

That is cool. Thanks!