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!
When I asked on Twitter a while back why we haven't see really much of any UI innovation in OS design in decades, I was told it's because there were no improvements left to be made. Which I found unconvincing.
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I think there isn't a lot of low-hanging fruit left. What is left is more complicated to implement, more complicated to present, more complicate to understand.
OS design has gotten as far as it has now by appealing to the lowest common denominator.
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showed off a very cool OS project in discord after . I don't think it's online anywhere, but here's what I found— you can see a custom concatenative lang, editor, cell sim & rendering. Note the units on compile time :D
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i'd say the uxn project by approximates an OS :)
wiki.xxiivv.com/site/uxn.html
github.com/hundredrabbits
it has by far the most active internet community, as well
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*scoffs at that crappy looking clock*
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How are you having access to see PlayBit's interface design? Is there a private beta in progress?
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Oh, my comment's just based on the intermittent images Rasmus has tweeted!
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