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Visopsys GUI design project

Posted: Tue Jan 21, 2014 1:28 am
by nick
It isn't to professional, but good enough to give you an idea of how this GUI design works.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4OklE ... sp=sharing

Also, another possibility would be to port a DE (desktop environment) to the platform. Linux is very rich in this domain and all (I think) of its DEs are free and provide the source code, which could speed the porting process. And some of those DEs would fit great with Visopsys philosophy and others are more minimalistic or focused on design. MINIX3 is also at the "same" stage: finding a GUI, but I read that a Linux DE: EDE (Equinox DE) was successfully ported to the platform not long ago. Also, these DEs are not only used on Linux; some on BSD and Solaris. It would provide a good temporary GUI.

Re: Visopsys GUI design project

Posted: Tue Jan 21, 2014 8:57 am
by nextvolume
Hm, your GUI project looks somewhat like the Win 8.x Metro interface, but multi-tiled - today it is fashionable to try to reimagine the graphical user interface, but speaking from experience, to do work there is nothing better than a WIMP paradigm (Windows, Icons and Menus Paradigm) on desktops - no other GUI paradigm is near it regarding ease of use, simplicity and productivity.

About the second approach, I think it won't work - the architecture of Visopsys, especially the user interface, is radically different from the one used by *nix-like operating systems; in fact not only the graphics stack is inside the kernel, but so are the GUI toolkit and image loading routines.
*nix-like operating systems on the other hand tend to have these facilities (mostly) in user-space

Also, due to other factors (DEs tend to depend on libraries, which in turn depend on other libraries, which in turn also want a POSIX compliant libc) and what I've just explained, porting a DE is going to be take more effort than what it is worth.

Visopsys is great for what it is - an extremely small, yet graphical operating system that uses its own paradigms that are like nothing else. If you have programming knowledge and free time it is quite easy to work and improve it.