Redox - Your Next(Gen) OS - Redox - Your Next(Gen) OS
www.redox-os.org
The Redox official website

This isn’t Linux, but Linux-like. Its a microkernel built from the rust programming language. Its still experimental, but I think it has great potential. It has a GUI desktop, but the compiler isn’t quite fully working yet.

Has anyone used this before? What was your experience with it?

Note: If this is inappropriate since this isn’t technically Linux, mods please take down.

    • Static_Rocket@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12·
      1 year ago

      Eh, I welcome the iteration. It gives people a reason to practice and hey, who knows, maybe they’ll come up with something neat while rewriting curl or something

    • mogoh@lemmy.ml
      11·
      1 year ago

      Some thoughts:

      • Testing the capabilities of rust and proving what rust is capable of.
      • Seeing what rust is not capable of and proposing improvements for the rust language and ecosystem.
      • Trying new OS concepts. Linux for example is strongly backwards compatible. Starting a new OS is the opportunity to do things different and maybe better.
      • Maybe it will turn out, that the memory safety will improve OS’. We will only know for sure, if we try it.
    • DumbAceDragon@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      106·
      1 year ago

      This is one of my main gripes with the rust community. What programming language you used shouldn’t be of any concern to the end-user, let alone be put in the tagline.

      Rust is a very good and capable language and I enjoy using it. I can’t wait for the day it overtakes C or C++. But I want to know more about the program I’m using other than that it was written in a popular language.

      “Written in rust” is basically a meme at this point.

      • Mactan@lemmy.ml
        7·
        1 year ago

        not necessarily about the language, but things periodically getting rewritten or re-implemented is a useful exercise. it’s a moment for reflection and analysis of the structures and systems as a whole

      • davel [he/him]@lemmy.mlEnglish
        6·
        1 year ago

        This is typical of when a language is the new hotness. It eventually dies down, either because the language becomes endemic or it fades away.

    • redempt@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      I’ve been installing a lot of things written in rust recently, and I’ve noticed a trend between them. They’re all stable, fast, and very user-friendly. I don’t really have to fiddle with them nearly as much. I think there’s a lot that goes into this, but it really boils down to: rust is safer and prevents huge categories of bugs, it’s incredibly stable and requires less debugging and maintenance, it has extremely high level abstractions to make development quick and less verbose, and it has the best tooling I have seen for any language. It enables developers so effectictively that the things that are usually tedious and difficult become easy and potentially mandatory, and so you just get better software.

      I know that sounds pretty abstract and opinionated, but having used the language for several years now, and especially coming from Java, I have really felt an incredible difference - I stopped having to constantly fix breaking Gradle builds and JVM version management, I stopped getting null pointer exceptions, and I had much more powerful tools for building abstractions. When you see how much control and power rust gives you while still keeping you safe, it’s just night and day compared to the especially old languages like C.

      Basically, anything written in rust will be better if it can enable developers to spend their time working on useful features instead of fixing bugs, fiddling with build systems and fragile legacy infrastructure cobbled together from dozens of third party tools.