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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

This is the thing that confused me. What exactly is the audience for this? It seems like more of an intricate art project than a useful piece of software.

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> On Monday, August 26, 1991 l 6:12:08 PM UTC+12, Linus Benedict Torvalds wrote:

> Hello everybody out there using minix -

> I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and

> professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing

> since april, and is starting to get ready.

Goosebumps.

It is exactly that - an art project.

Maybe it will also be useful some day, maybe not, but to me at least that's not the point. It's really cool that we can fund some art projects like this in the software industry!

Not a perfect comparison, but it's like how some people approach math simply for the beauty of it. That's enough of a reason! And sometimes that math ends up useful too - maybe because math has a connection to reality. So does software - it runs.

I do that. I write software that I like, and want to use.

I also have some experience with the Recovery community, and most of my work is actually designed for that community.

I wish him the very best. I wonder if he uses any of the stuff I wrote?

Recovery as in recovery from drugs? Or from data loss?

Consider the context.

I do things One Day at A Time, and More Will Be Revealed.

https://justforfunnoreally.dev/

The audience is the people who contribute to the art project and want to be part of the community. A community that serves itself for no other reason than to serve itself. Seems like a good time to me

This has educational value. If you are wondering "how this part of OS would be implemented" you can look up how Serenity team did that. Also even more interesting is trying to implement this for yourself (for Serenity), if you are brave enough.

Well, more or less, at the moment it’s for fun and art. It’s recreational. Odd thing is that SerenityOS has made so much progress so quickly that it may soon be a viable daily-use operating system.

I for one am looking forward to that. The pace of OS development has been inspiring, to say nothing of the appliations (a usable browser?!)

It has a nice consistent ui toolkit that seems highly productive. I hope the user-space (window manager, default apps) eventually becomes an alternative linux user-space.

The audience is hackers as it should be. You can't cater to daily users at this stage. You want people who can potentially fix the bugs they come across or add the features they miss. A usable OS is no joke and it certainly isn't a one man project. If enough people get on this, it might actually become daily-usable.

I was wondering the same. Nothing against the project, but from reading about it I’m confused why I would choose this over my preferred OS (and therefore how it makes enough money).

But then again there are so many distros it’s not that surprising.

It continues to baffle me how a newsboard called hackernews has countless people who are incapable of seeing the value in making something for the sake of making it.

Good for you!

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