OSDev.org

Title says it all, really

For me, I could have a go at using anything with a reasonable IMAP client and a web browser. There are many hobby OSes that are at that sort of point - so I was wondering if anyone had tried using their own OS as their primary OS.

Supporting software is not the only factor here. You also have to deal with hardware too. Writing a proper GPU driver is difficult, especially for those cards that have no public documentation (e.g. NVIDIA).

Roman wrote:Supporting software is not the only factor here. You also have to deal with hardware too. Writing a proper GPU driver is difficult, especially for those cards that have no public documentation (e.g. NVIDIA).

Definitely, but in some cases (such as my own) I would be fully satisfied with just a web browser and sound player (which means down to the OS itself, I really need just a graphical UI, network driver and sound driver; no GPU.) Of course, I am making it sound like something small; getting a hobby OS to that point is going to take years of work.
IMHO, the two OSes which are most likely to reach this position are Haiku, and then ToaruOS.

Sure
Everybody did that!

I bet a few people might have been forced to do so when they maximized qemu/virtualbox and forgot how to get out.

hardware accelerated graphics drivers are not necessary any more, the cpus are very fast

bauen1 wrote:I bet a few people might have been forced to do so when they maximized qemu/virtualbox and forgot how to get out.

I didn't think that vi was bloated enough to be counted as an operating system

Geri wrote:hardware accelerated graphics drivers are not necessary any more, the cpus are very fast

Today's CPUs are very fast, but not fast enough if you wanted a modern looking desktop running at a high resolution.

matt11235: cpus are very fast, for example the previous debian version used software opengl rasterizer with amd cards as default, i had 1360x768 screen, i had amd athlon2 x4 635 cpu @ 3,1 ghz, it was even fluid when 3d kde display effects was enabled, even if i watched hd videos, everything was perfectly fluid, it not even utilized more than 1 core generally.

now debian switched back to hardware 3d with radeons, the display is now actually SLOWER.

a modern i7 should be capable of rendering a HD desktop with just one core even when you do bilinear filtering and alphamapped display elements and effects, it should stay far above 25 fps in all cases, unless you pack out tons of windows. actually even an 1,6 ghz atom should stay usable.

omarrx024 wrote:IMHO, the two OSes which are most likely to reach this position are Haiku, and then ToaruOS.

I wouldn't consider Haiku a hobby OS. But yes, ToaruOS is getting to that point now.

bauen1 wrote:I bet a few people might have been forced to do so when they maximized qemu/virtualbox and forgot how to get out.

lol

onlyonemac wrote:

omarrx024 wrote:IMHO, the two OSes which are most likely to reach this position are Haiku, and then ToaruOS.

I wouldn't consider Haiku a hobby OS. But yes, ToaruOS is getting to that point now.

And sortix.

obiwac wrote:And sortix.

Haven't tried sortix or seem much of it to be honest. Last I heard he had the ToaruOS window manager running on it (which begs the question of why the ToaruOS window manager can't run on any other POSIX system).

Sometimes I wish you could get somewhere without doing POSIX. But given what all the OSes that are considered somewhat successful here do, it doesn't seem to be realistic.

One reason why most hobby OS are not ready to be used in production is lack of drivers. There are a few hobby OS that have nice GUIs and/or lots of useful programs (e.g. vim/bash/GCC/make) but I haven't seen a hobby OS that has both a useful user-space and drivers for important devices like {U,E,X}HCI, AHCI, NVMe, Intel HDA and ACPI.

Actually, drivers aren't what I'm worried about. If I have some basic support for keyboard, mouse, storage, network and sound (which I do on one laptop at least), that's all that I really need from the hardware before I could call it somewhat usable. Having an actually useful userspace is the hard part, especially if you don't want to be fully POSIX. vim/bash/gcc/make is nice, but actually useful is a broswer, mail client, etc.