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prologic
twtxt.net
 (5w ago)

@david@daiwei.me Yes!

So, a hobby OS, just like Linux was for Linus?

Although this is really an exercise is self-hosting a lagnguage, then self-hosting the language to build a self-hosting OS. It’s all meta-circular.

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prologic
twtxt.net
 (5w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » After many months of hard™ work, I've finally been able to get Mu (µ) lang to a point where the duplication of machine code / assembly between the ARM64/AMD64 and Mach-O and ELF formats are not all eliminated. This now means that writing a new backend target os/arch for Mu is now relatively simple to do, or far less duplicated work/effort.

On that note, I just finished writing the linux/risc64 backend and it only took ~2k lines of code 🎉

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (6w ago)

I really think I should go back to Java.

Writing programs in Python is so exhausting. I want a compiler and I want static typing. No, linters and type checkers and IDEs are not good enough. Compilers catch way more errors in advance.

Rust is also exhausting. They’re constantly adding language features and, at the same time, the runtime library remains tiny and you need 3rd party libraries for everything. Many of those are still at version 0.x (SemVer!) and you can’t rely on anything. Often times, you need the latest Rust nightly compiler.

Go is … I don’t like it. And huge binaries.

I like C as a language, but it’s too fragile. I want to have a proper HashMap every now and then.

None of the above have good GUI libraries, at least not on Linux.

And then there’s Java. This is my fractal renderer that I wrote over 17 years ago:

https://movq.de/v/fcd3c4e557/vid-1784121825.mp4

It’s fast. It has a GUI with custom widgets and those weren’t even hard to make. It still works without changing a single line of code. The source code files have timestamps from 2009 and I just noticed that the JAR file I’m using in the video was compiled in 2010.

Java as a language is relatively easy to learn and to master. There are few surprises. The source code organization with packages is good. Java API docs are clear and well written.

The JVM ramp-up times have improved considerably:

https://movq.de/v/e7314e521e/vid-1784121998.mp4

This isn’t like the Dark Ages anymore. Might even be usable for some CLI tools.

The only thing where Java really sucks is anything close-ish to the kernel. Try issuing an ioctl() … I couldn’t have made my TUI framework in Java, but then again, I wouldn’t have needed to because Swing already exists and it just works.

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (6w ago)

Yeah, lol, fuck off. Tried to reproduce that hashing issue, thus playing around with Go a little bit. And what did I find?

$ tree ~/.config/go
/home/user/.config/go
└── telemetry
    ├── local
    │   ├── asm@devel-devel-linux-amd64-2026-07-14.v1.count
    │   ├── compile@devel-devel-linux-amd64-2026-07-14.v1.count
    │   ├── go@devel-devel-linux-amd64-2026-07-14.v1.count
    │   ├── link@devel-devel-linux-amd64-2026-07-14.v1.count
    │   ├── upload.token
    │   └── weekends
    └── upload

4 directories, 6 files

It collects and uploads “telemetry” now.

No.

(Don’t tell me how I can turn that off. Not interested. This is a compiler and it wants to track me, without asking for consent. That’s a no-go.)

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (7w ago)

Windows NT 4 didn’t have a Device Manager. You know, this thing right here that got introduced with Windows 95:

Image

And that’s super awkward in NT4.

You know what doesn’t have a Device Manager, either? Linux. Why? 🤔 Isn’t this one of the most useful system tools? It gives you an overview of the devices in your system and tells you which driver is used for them. Linux could really use such a tool, I think? 🤔

(There are programs like “hardinfo” and I remember ancient KDE providing such a tool, but they’re all an afterthought. Hardly integrated into the overall system.)

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (7w ago)

@GabesArcade@gabesarcade.com The no-JS part is one thing, but you also have to disable the (nowadays common) forced-HTTP-to-HTTPS-redirect, because those old browsers can’t do modern crypto. And make sure that your webserver serves the correct page even if no Host header is sent by the client. And don’t even think about serving UTF-8 or even just putting utf-8 in the content type. 😅 And for the JPEG thumbnails I pass a special flag to ImageMagick so that IBM Web Explorer from OS/2 won’t trip. 🤣 And always use link rel="stylesheet" for CSS, because some browsers render inlined CSS as literal text. And … probably more that I forgot by now. 😂

@david@daiwei.me Not sure, actually. Let’s see. Those are the ones where I still have the original disks (or have bought them on eBay again):

  • SuSE Linux 6.4 (it’s a massive 7 CD distro with a huge manual, best thing ever)
  • OS/2 2.1
  • OS/2 Warp 3 (red and blue spine because $reasons)
  • OS/2 Warp 4
  • PC DOS 7
  • MS-DOS 6.22
  • Windows 3.1
  • Windows for Workgroups 3.11
  • Windows 95 C
  • Windows 98
  • Windows NT 4 Workstation (still in the mail, though 😅)
  • Windows 2000
  • Windows XP Professional (last Windows I ever used on my private PCs)

(Plus a few “classic” office products as can be seen here: https://movq.de/blog/postings/2024-05-23/0/POSTING-en.html )

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (10w ago)

Speaking of UIs, this is how Thunderbird looks now:

https://movq.de/v/a41105eebb/

So we continue to let every program make up its own UI style (and then we complain that “the Linux desktop” looks “messy” and “inconsistent”). I guess this uses GTK, but it doesn’t look like any other GTK program. Buttons, tabs, drop-downs, whatever, it’s all different. It even has its own subwindow system (i.e., popups that you can’t move).

I didn’t say this in the blog post, but I’m convinced that programmers these days absolutely positively hate everything that looks even remotely like Windows 95 or Motif – with a passion. I see that in my coworkers as well, they really can’t stand it. It’s an emotional thing.

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (16w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » @lyse These days (and it’s been like that for a while), almost everything is loaded on-demand depending on which hardware the OS finds, so you can simply copy all your files with cp -a, install a bootloader, adjust some minor things /etc/fstab, done. Well, maybe not “done”, but it’s easy to sort out the remaining stuff afterwards.

@bender@twtxt.net It’s been a while (6.5 years) since I’ve done this. I’d do it like this:

  • Boot some Linux from a USB stick on the new machine. Preferably Arch Linux, since that is what I’m running and that’ll make the upcoming chroot easier.
  • Partition the new disk, create LUKS devices, filesystems, …
  • Mount the new filesystems and copy all data (user data and the system itself – everything). Do this either over the network or by hooking up the old disk directly.
  • chroot into the new system (Arch has an arch-chroot tool for that which is used during normal installation, if I’m not mistaken). Inside the chroot, install the bootloader.
  • Do some fixups, like adjusting /etc/fstab or /etc/crypttab.

And I think that should be it. 🤔

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