There are lots of indie/hobbyist OSes, but they rarely contain striking interface ideas. One theory: it's a money-hole, so authors are mostly solo; a solo eng can ship an OS but usually can't design good novel UIs; a solo designer can't ship an OS; a collab will be ^2 rare. But:
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What about indie film directors? There are lots of super-low-budget projects which have striking and artistic ideas as well as impressive technical know-how.
And: what about indie video games? Lots of great games have art, design, eng—even music!—done by 1 person.
Why the diff?
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When I think of novel OSes expressing unusual UI ideas, designed and actually built by the same person, the contemporary projects that come to mind are Dynamicland and 's Playbit. Please name others if you know them!
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The % of great games done by 1 person is tiny. We see a handful every year simply because there are TONS of people doing games on their own.
You would find a lot more interesting cases in OS development if it was as popular as gamedev.
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Indie film directors don't have to manufacture their own cameras.
Indie games are mostly built on engines that abstract enough detail for someone to just develop "the game", and not the whole game system.
Building an OS and a GUI are two very different levels of abstraction.
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Whereas cameras and game engines are reasonably content-agnostic, building a fundamentally different UI on top of an existing operating system is not generally doable because the OS has lots fo baked-in assumptions about interaction. We don't know the right abstractions / layers.
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The barrier to entry on making an OS is considerably higher. Also, there is probably a self-selection effect where highly creative people follow their easiest path to self expression.
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I know that I'm not bothering to create a whole OS to accomplish my novel UI ideas. That seems like a great way to waste a lot of time on things I don't care about and never actually see if my ideas are worthwhile.
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Unlike with movies and games, users will criticize the UI and expect to be able to change it. UI then quickly turns into a massive bikeshedding or source of complaints/requests/etc. Probably makes it feel safer to not rock the boat.
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i think the ability to acquire a toolset that allows one’s creativity to be expressed is different in creative arts (music, film, writing, etc) v. programming
one can use $ to buy the tools to make a movie, but one often has to code all their tools to make an OS
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theres a lot of components to the os system, which makes it tough for an individuals creativity to be expressed into it
hopefully, the increase in open-source libraries will enable solo developers to reach higher heights, as sub-systems can be solved by simply learning an API
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