[marssaxman]

Some of us are still interested in the world underneath all that web stuff!

Multiple experimental operating systems at multiple abstraction levels sounds like a good idea, though. What sort of system software would you like to build?

[jes5199]

I’m actually building an “OS” that’s up a level. it’s more like git, it has a concept of files but they’re documents in a distributed store. I can experiment with interaction patterns without caring about device drivers

[ogogmad]

Operating systems are where device drivers live. It sounds awfully impractical to develop alternatives at this stage. I think OP is right.

I think OSes should just freeze all their features right now. Does anyone remember all the weird churn in the world of Linux, where (i) KDE changed from version 3 to 4, which broke everyone's KDE completely unnecessarily (ii) GNOME changed from version 2 to 3, which did the same (iii) Ubuntu Linux decided to change their desktop environment away from GNOME for no reason - but then unchanged it a few years later? When all was said and done, nothing substantive really got done.

So stop changing things at the OS level. Only make conservative changes which don't break the APIs and UIs. Time to feature-freeze, and work on the layers above. If the upper layers take over the work of the lower layers, then over time the lower layers can get silently replaced.

[lproven]

> Ubuntu Linux decided to change their desktop environment away from GNOME for no reason

Oh, there absolutely were reasons. I covered them here:

https://www.theregister.com/Print/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft...

I have never had so much negative feedback and ad-hom attacks on HN as for that story, I think. :-D

Short version, the chronology goes like this:

2004: Ubuntu does the first more-or-less consumer-quality desktop Linux that is 100% free of charge. No paid version. It uses the current best of breed FOSS components and they choose GNOME 2, Mozilla, and OpenOffice.

By 2006 Ubuntu 6.06 "Dapper Drake" comes out, the first LTS. It is catching on a bit.

Fedora Core 6 and RHEL 4 are also getting established, and both use GNOME 2. Every major distro offers GNOME 2, even KDE-centric ones like SUSE. Paid distros like Mandriva and SUSE as starting to get in some trouble -- why pay when Ubuntu does the job?

Even Solaris uses GNOME 2.

2006-2007, MS is getting worried and starts talking about suing. It doesn't know who yet so it just starts saying intentionally not-vague-at-all things like the Linux desktop infringes "about 265 patents".

This is visibly true if you are 35-40 years old: if you remember desktop GUI OSes before 1995, they were all over the place. Most had desktop drive icons. Most had a global menu bar at the top. This is because most copied MacOS. Windows was an ugly mess and only lunatics copied that. (Enter the Open Group with Motif.)

But then came Win95. Huge hit.

After 1995, every GUI gets a task bar, it gets buttons for apps, even window managers like Fvwm95 and soon after IceWM. QNX Neutrino looks like it. OS/2 Warp 4 looks like it. Everyone copies it.

Around the time NT 4 is out and Win98 is taking shape, both KDE and GNOME get going and copy the Win9x look and feel. Xfce dumps its CDE look and feel, goes FOSS, and becomes a Win95 copy.

MS had a case. Everyone had copied them. MS is not stupid and it's been sued lots of times. You betcha it patented everything and kept the receipts. The only problem it has is: who does it sue?

RH says no. GNOME 3 says "oh noes our industry leading GU is, er, yeah, stale, it's stagnant, it's not changing, so what we're gonna do is rip it up and start again! With no taskbar and no hierarchical start menu and no menu bars in windows and no OK and CANCEL buttons at the bottom" and all the other things that they can identify that are from Win9x.

GNOME is mainly sponsored by Red Hat.

Canonical tries to get involved; RH says fsck off. It can't use KDE, that's visibly a ripoff. Ditto Xfce, Enlightenment, etc. LXDE doesn't exist yet.

So it does its own thing based on the Netbook Launcher. If it daren't imitate Windows then what's the leading other candidate? This Mac OS X thing is taking off. It has borrowed some stuff from Windows like Cmd+Tab and Fast User Switching and stuff and got away with it. Let's do that, then.

SUSE just wearily says "OK, how much? Where do we sign?"

[zozbot234]

RISC OS had a recognizable task bar around 1987, so 2006-2007 is just long enough for any patent on that concept to definitely expire. This story doesn't make any sense. As for dialog boxes with buttons at the bottom and plenty of buttons inside apps, the Amiga had them in 1984.

[lproven]

> RISC OS had a recognizable task bar around 1987

Absolutely not the same thing -- and I bought my first Archimedes in 1989.

It's a bar and it contains icons, but it does not have:

* a hierarchical app launcher at one end

* buttons for open _windows_

* a separate area of smaller icons for notifications & controls

* it can't be repositioned or placed in portrait orientation

I am more familiar with this subject than you might realise. I arranged for the project lead of RISC OS to do this talk:

https://www.rougol.jellybaby.net/meetings/2012/PaulFellows/

Then a decade later I interviewed him:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/23/how_risc_os_happened/

Yes, the Icon Bar is prior art, but there are 2 problems with that.

1. It directly inspired the NeXTstep Dock.

This is unprovable after so long, but the strong suspicion is that the Dock inspired Windows 4 "Chicago" (later Windows 95) -- MS definitely knew of NeXT, but probably never heard of Acorn.

So it's 2nd hand inspiration.

2. The Dock isn't a taskbar either.

3. What the prior art may be doesn't matter unless Acorn asserted it, which AFAIK it didn't, as it no longer existed by the time of the legal threats. Nobody else did either.

4. The product development of Win95 is well documented and you can see WIP versions, get them from the Internet Archive and run them, or just peruse screenshot galleries.

http://toastytech.com/guis/c73.html

The odd thing is that the early development versions look less like the Dock or Icon Bar than later ones. It's not a direct copy: it's convergent evolution. If they'd copied, they would have got there a lot sooner, and it would be more similar than it is.

> so 2006-2007 is just long enough for any patent on that concept to definitely expire.

RISC OS as Arthur: 1987

NeXTstep 0.8 demo: 1988

Windows "Chicago" test builds: 1993, 5Y later, well inside a 20Y patent lifespan

Win95 release: 8Y later

KDE first release: 1998

GNOME first release: 1999

The chronology doesn't add up, IMHO.

> This story doesn't make any sense. As for dialog boxes with buttons at the bottom and plenty of buttons inside apps, the Amiga had them in 1984.

You're missing a different point here.

Buttons at the bottom date back to at least the Lisa.

The point is that GNOME 3 visibly and demonstrably was trying to avoid potential litigation by moving them to the CSD bar at the top. Just as in 1983 or so GEM made its menu bar drop-down instead of pull-down (menus open on mouseover, not on click) and in 1985 or so AmigaOS made them appear and open only on a right-click -- in attempts to avoid getting sued by Apple.

[zozbot234]

> The point is that GNOME 3 visibly and demonstrably was trying to avoid potential litigation by moving them to the CSD bar at the top.

Well, the buttons in the titlebar at the top are reminiscent of old Windows CE dialog boxes, so I guess they're not really original either! What both Unity and GNOME 3 looks like to me is an honest attempt to immediately lead in "convergence" with mobile touch-based solutions. They first came up in the netbook era where making Linux run out-of-the-box on a market-leading small-screen, perhaps touch-based device was quite easy - a kind of ease we're only now getting back to, in fact.

[lproven]

Ooh, WinCE -- I'd forgotten about that, but then, I've been actively trying to. ;-)

Those are good points, and I can't argue with them.