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This is mostly a note to myself.

It's interesting to consider "what next" once an OS project reaches this stage. There are soo many directions a team can take, but also, none of those direction lead to a clear path towards massive user adoption.

There are obvious holes/gaps in what mainstream OSes offer today, however it is not clear how a project goes from here to addressing those gaps, and even if those were to be addressed, it is not clear how it could displace mainstream OSes.

We are clearly better off having projects like this, that give us options in case something were to go horribly wrong with mainstream OSes. However, what is the incentive to keep projects like this alive when the path ahead is soo unclear?

How does one disrupt the operating systems market?



Motor OS (https://motor-os.org) attempts to do exactly that, by focusing on a rather narrow, from a "mainstream OS", point of view, niche. Kind of "do this one thing better" approach.


rather than displace mainstream os's what id rather have is some way to easily switch os depending on my task, gaming? windows, anything else? linux (for now), and have that run directly on the hardware with little interference... like a meta task switcher os.

someone is going to come on here and tell me we already have this (i hope).

ive been out of computing for so long i dont know if this reliably exists, but back in the day this is what i would have wished for.


and since i dont trust windows to host my work os securely, and performance of games would be abysmal with the hosting roles reversed, what i really need is 2 boxes and a kvm switch!. the question now becomes, are there physical systems that turn on and off at the same time... i.e. share a psu but host different os's!

suppose i could build my own

am i looking at building a rack mounted system? heh, think i just found a project for myself.

1 psu, 1 gpu (for gaming), 1 kb/monitor, 2 hdd, 2 motherboards, 1 kvm switch, build my own rack out of wood, done! so the only extra cost really should be the 2nd motherboard and the kvm switch.


You can avoid the kvm with a cheap USB switch and software.

https://github.com/haimgel/display-switch


I was actually starting to think about how I could make a KVM due to the costs but this link looks really interesting. Just have a PC and a work laptop and switch between the two. Thank you!


A hypervisor does what you want, though note that the low level ones that run as the OS are generally geared towards servers, not desktops


You're talking about a type 1 hypervisor from what I've just read. Linux KVM/QEMU looks interesting. Do you think win 11 would work at near native speeds under this?


AFAIK it works reasonably well under Qubes OS with a relatively simple installation.




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