I feel like most articles challenging OSes have no idea what an OS is.
Sure question what the latest tool can offer and how to integrate with it... but that's just being an app, or a window manager, or a package manager, or a distribution, that's not challenging what the OS itself is and does.
If your OS doesn't change how a computer allocates resources, then you are talking about higher level, and that can be super valuable too, arguably more valuable, but ... that's a different thing.
PS: also chroot (half a century, just checked for the fun of it), jails, containers, VMs, etc limiting how the allocation can be done do exist and have been used for decades already.
I hear what you’re saying, but we don’t have a word for that different thing. OS means the kernel. But OS also means the entire distribution - all of macOS, all of iOS, all of windows, Ubuntu, Android, etc.
Until we have a standard word for the ui “shell” that comes out of the box with the OS distribution, people - including me - are gonna call (and think of it) as the OS. Or part of the os. Or something like that.
Microsoft hasn't really used that nomenclature since NT took over all their operating systems. Windows shell+kernel = OS. MacOS = shell+kernel = OS.
It's really the unix/linux world that stuck hard with these being separate things.
Exactly. The windows operating system isn’t just the nt kernel. It’s also all the UI that comes out of the box, that sits on top of that kernel. What is iOS? An operating system. What kind of software is springboard? It’s part of iOS. Part of the operating system.
An operating system is a lot more than just the kernel.
utopiah · · focus · HN ↗
Sure question what the latest tool can offer and how to integrate with it... but that's just being an app, or a window manager, or a package manager, or a distribution, that's not challenging what the OS itself is and does.
If your OS doesn't change how a computer allocates resources, then you are talking about higher level, and that can be super valuable too, arguably more valuable, but ... that's a different thing.
PS: also chroot (half a century, just checked for the fun of it), jails, containers, VMs, etc limiting how the allocation can be done do exist and have been used for decades already.
josephg · · focus · HN ↗
I hear what you’re saying, but we don’t have a word for that different thing. OS means the kernel. But OS also means the entire distribution - all of macOS, all of iOS, all of windows, Ubuntu, Android, etc.
Until we have a standard word for the ui “shell” that comes out of the box with the OS distribution, people - including me - are gonna call (and think of it) as the OS. Or part of the os. Or something like that.
Bjartr · · focus · HN ↗
> we don’t have a word for ... the ... distribution
> Until we have a ... word for the ... shell
distribution/distro and shell are exactly the words we have for these things
But OS sounds more impressive/important, so it's a lot more prevalent.
pixl97 · · focus · HN ↗
It's really the unix/linux world that stuck hard with these being separate things.
josephg · · focus · HN ↗
An operating system is a lot more than just the kernel.