John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

Another point I would add in support of that meme comment, is Google's recent rug-pull of Android not allowing sideloading apps from unsigned developers anymore starting this autumn, after over a decade of conquering the market with their "go with us, we're the open alternative to iOS" marketing.

The conclusion is to just never EVER trust big-tech/VC/PE companies, even when they do nice things, since they're 100% just playing the long game, getting buddy-buddy with you waiting till they smothered the competition with their warchest, and then the inevitable rug-pull comes once you're tied to their ecosystem and you have nowhere else to go.

Avoid these scumbags, go FOSS form the start, go TempleOS. /s but not really

I mean, I'd give a fair shake to an OS from the SQLite team [1].

1. https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html

But ultimately it just makes sense to adapt existing kernels / OS (say, arch) and adapt it to your needs. It can be hair wrenchingly frustrating, and requires the company to be willing to upstream changes and it still takes years, but the alternative is decades, because what sounds good and well designed on paper just melts when it hits the real world, and linux has already gone through those decades of pain.

For example any of the systems listed in Carmack’s post. Or perhaps Serenity OS, RedoxOS, etc.

I’ve seen this firsthand. These giant tech companies try to just jump into a massive new project thinking that because they have built such an impressive website and have so much experience at scale they should just be able to handle building a new OS.

In my case it wasn’t even a new OS it was just building around an existing platform and even that was massively problematic.

The companies that build them from scratch have had it as one of their core competencies pretty much from the start.

I’m unsurprised meta had issues like this.

This is madness. The safe space culture has really gone too far.

The technical justification for Meta writing their own OS is that they'd get to make design decisions that suited them at a very deep level, not that they could do the work equivalent of contributing a few drivers to an existing choice.

The OS does process scheduling, program management, etc. Ok, you don’t want a VR headset to run certain things slowly or crash. But some Linux distributions are battle-tested and stable, and fast, so can’t you write ordinary programs that are fast and reliable (e.g. the camera movement and passthrough use RTLinux and have a failsafe that has been formally verified or extensively tested) and that’s enough?

Yes.

The only thing I can imagine that would be more invasive would require a brain implant.

These days, you get a medium-level description and a Linux driver of questionable quality. Part of this is just laziness, but mostly this is a function of complexity. Modern hardware is just so complicated it would take a long time to completely document, and even longer to write a driver for.

If a professional can't give critical feedback in a professional setting without being rude or belittling others, then they need to improve their communication skills.

We also need to be clear what an OS is. Is it "darwin" or "macOS" - they have different scopes.

Things I'd want from an OS for an XR device.

1. Fast boot. I don't want to have to wait 2-3-4-5 minutes to reboot for those times I need to reboot.

I feel like Nintendo figured this out? It updates the OS in the background somehow and reboot is nearly instant.

2. Zero jank. I'm on XR, if the OS janks in any way people will get sick AND perceive the product as sucking. At least I do. iOS is smooth, Androind is jank AF.

Do any of the existing OSes provide this? Sure, maybe take an existing OS an modify it, assuming you can.

if youre apple, it does make sense to do stuff from scratch. i think in a way, software guys wind up building their own prisons. an api is created to solve problem X given world Y, but world Y+1 has a different set of problems - problems that may no longer be adequately addressed given the api invented for X.

people talk about "rewrite everything in rust" - I say, why stop there? lets go down to the metal. make every byte, every instruction, every syscall a commodity. imagine if we could go all the way back to bare metal programming, simply by virtue of the LLM auto-coding the bootloader, scheduler, process manager, all in-situ.

the software world is full of circularities like that. we went from Mainframe -> local -> mainframe, why not baremetal -> hosted -> baremetal?

Mind you, this XROS idea came after Oculus reorged into FB proper. It felt to me like there were FB teams (or individuals) that wanted get on the ARVR train. Carmack was absolutely right, and after the reorg his influence slowly waned for the worse.

But I have wondered why one of these companies with billions of dollars to burn hasn't tried to create something new as a strategic initiative. Yes, there wouldn't be any ROI for years, and yes, the first several products on the platform would probably be better off on something more traditional.

But the long term value could potentially be astronomical.

Just another case of quarterly-report-driven decision making, I suppose. Sigh.

That jives with my sense that META is a mediocre company

Still a very interesting project, but that feels like a similar story, for limited use cases (a smart thermostat/speaker with specific hardware) it works, but for wider use cases with heterogeneus hardware and complex interfaces (actual screen, peripherals) it didn't work.

It's also very hard to do so.

Pretty sure that's false: I remember seeing the recent commit that made Grok misbehave.

> Here's an experiment for you: open X in a new private tab and count political posts, see how many of them are far right. Bias is evident.

Go to Bluesky and count far left posts. The result will be similar, because political bubbles form by themselves.

Building a hobby OS taught me how little is just "software". The CPU sets the rules. Page tables exist because the MMU says so. Syscalls are privilege flips. Task switches are register loads and TLB churn. Drivers are interrupt choreography. The OS to me is just policy wrapped around fixed machinery.

You can't do it without going through their fucking app, that asks for every permissions under the sun, including GPS positioning for some reason. After finally getting this app working and pairing it with my headset, I could finally realize the controller was just dead and their was nothing to do.

Not updated in two years.

> Go to Bluesky...

At least people are not fantasizing about "race wars" or discussing the "jewsish question" there. Two subjects I saw multiple times on X's front page.

Roll call!

The driver ecosystem is the moat. Linux finally overcame it decades later

Most opinions of this man exists in a vacuum space isolated from the real world software industry. Building an OS from scratch is one of those examples.

It’s never seems like there’s a significant reason behind them other than………”I made dat :P”

If you're in the middle of trying to write a new operating system, then it's probably not helpful to have John Carmack standing over you repeatedly telling you that you shouldn't be doing it. In this case Carmack gets the last laugh. Then again, it is easy to get the last laugh by predicting that a project will fail, given that most projects do.

Android suffers from being Java at the core, with all the baggage that brings with it.

Actually, I don't know how you join the Ita now that you mention it.

If you're competing against nothing, then I see it: it opens up a wide variety of product possibilities. But linux exists. Why not spend 1/1000th the time to adapt linux?

That's not even counting the rather substantial risk that your new OS will never approach the capabilities of linux, and may very well never become generally usable at all.

Option A: spend years and millions on a project that may never be as good as existing solutions, diverting attention and resources from actual products, or...

Option B: work on products now, using an existing, high-quality, extensible, adaptable OS, with very friendly licensing terms, for which numerous experts exist, with a proven track record of maintenance, a working plan for sustainability, a large & healthy developer community exists, etc.

It's hard to imagine how it wouldn't be a complete waste of time.

Being "reported to HR" doesn't mean "almost got fired". It likely meant a meeting where someone explained "hey, the way you communicated that caused some upset, let's discuss better ways to handle that situation next time." Very often in larger companies, complaints about things like "this bigwig from this other group jumped all over us" are automatically sent through HR because HR has staff whose job just is resolving conflicts between people and keeping things peaceful.

Everything is ASAP. They are super excited about everything. And nothing you do is wrong, it just could be improved or they like it but don't love it.

You don't know if something is important, basically.

Just like Louis CK said, "if you used 'amazing' on chicken nuggets, what are you going to say when your first child is born?". But in reverse.

Personally, I'd rather work with someone who would tell me my work is terrible if it is.

In Germany, you can't even legally say somebody did a bad job at your company in a recommendation letter. Companies created a whole subtext to workaround that, it's crazy.

Some things are just bad. You should be able to say it is. Not by saying it could be better. Not by using euphemism. It's just something that needs to go to the trash.

In fact, I don't trust people who can't receive this information, even if not packaged with tact (which you should attempt to, but life happens). If you can't handle people not being perfectly polite every time, I can't help but feel I won't be able to count on you when things get hard.

That must be the French in me talking.

This gives you best of both worlds - carefully designed system for the hardware with near optimal performance, and still with the ability to take advantage of the full linux kernel for management, monitoring, debugging, etc.

Cool off.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Switch_system_softw...

He was the CTO of Oculus. Surely it is appropriate for the CTO to give advice on any big technical decisions, if not outright have veto power.

Google has Fuchsia - is about 10 years in development. Recently was a target for layoffs

I've had it happen to me too, but my response was to resign on the spot (I was already not satisfied with the company).

The "toxic behaviour" I had done? I reverted a commit on the master branch that didn't compile, and sent a slack to the Dev who had committed it saying "hi! There appears to have been a mistake in your latest commit, could you please check it out and fix it? I've reverted it in the meantime since I need to deploy this other feature"

The dev responded by force pushing the code that did not compile to master and contacted HR.

I decided there was greener grass on other pastures. I was right.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS_NEXT https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi24/presentation/chen-h...

None of the code they wrote couldn't have just been written as a kernel module in Linux. It would've also been so much easier due to all the documentation and general knowledge people have about Linux both within the company and outside the company.

It's probably not that hard to write bare metal code for a modern CPU that runs and crashes. It's obviously insurmountably hard to compete with Android in features with scratch built bare metal code. An "OS" can be anything between the two. But it's very easy to imagine an "XR OS" project snowballing quickly into the latter, and Carmack's concerns would be spot on(as always is, and as proven). Is it then an inherent difficulty in "designing a new operating system", or is it technically something else?

"Far left posts" are like, what, people should have access to healthcare? People should pay more taxes?

I'm not familiar of any platform that calls for collective ownership of the means of production, land redistribution and other far left positions.

You can always mmap /dev/mem to get at physical memory.

5 Millions alone for the AMD graphic driver.

The people who develop OSes are cut from a different cloth and are not under the usual economic pressures.

(And I feel bad saying this since Meta obviously did waste eleventy billion on their ridiculous Second Life recreation project ...)

That's what's claimed. That's what people say, yet it's just an excuse. I've heard the same sort of excuse people have, after they write a massive codebase, then say "Oops, sorry, didn't get around to documenting it".

And no, hardware is not more difficult than software to document.

If the system is complex, there's more need to document, just as with a huge codebase. On their end, they have new employees to train up, and they have to manage testing. So any excuse that silicon vendors have to deal with such immense complexity? My violin plays for them.

So please don't mock the spend. Big spends fail sometimes, and at least people were paid to do the work.

So someone at Meta was so sensitive that being told their behemoth of a project was ill advised ended up getting reported to HR?

MS is a state backed company. Very natural that China went the same path.

If they'd spent the money researching nuclear fusion or space flight or a new way to develop microprocessors, I would be cheering their efforts even if they had failed in the end.

I think it was insane to start a new OS effort written in C/C++. We have plenty of OSes written in C/C++! We know how that story ends. If you're going to spend the effort, at least try a new language that could enable a better security model.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/singularity...

They have; Taligent comes to mind. You may not have heard of that -- or more likely, you have but just forgot about it -- but it's a good object lesson (no pun intended) in why a successful new OS is hard to just conjure into existence. There has to be a crying, desperate need for it, not just a vague sense that This Time We'll Get It Right.

You could probably cite OS/2 Warp as a less-obscure example of the same phenomenon.

On the other hand, Meta's experiment is primarily CEO-driven. The outcome is predetermined, changing direction is not possible. Sure, clever engineers get to draw the rest of the owl, but that's not very useful when it turns out that everyone needs a horse instead.

They are spending a fortune, but rather than getting 900 crappy ideas to throw away and 100 great ones to pick from for continued development, they are developing 1 technological marvel nobody is interested in.

I've only seen John Carmack's public interactions, but they've all been professional and kind.

It's depressing to imagine HR getting involved because someone's feelings had been hurt by an objective discussion from a person like John Carmack.

I'm having flashbacks to the times in my career when coworkers tried to weaponize HR to push their agenda. Every effort was eventually dismissed by HR, but there is a chilling effect on everyone when you realize that someone at the company is trying to put your job at stake because they didn't like something you said. The next time around, the people targeted are much more hesitant to speak up.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/whatever-happened-to-microsoft...

impact is facebook for “how useful is this to the company” and its an explicit axis of judgement.

See Google's Fuschia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuchsia_(operating_system)

> But the long term value could potentially be astronomical.

Such as what?

It’s not first party documentation that’s the problem. The problem is that they don’t share that documentation, so in order to get documentation for an “unsupported” OS a 3rd party needs to reverse engineer it.

When I was on nuclear submarines we'd call what you are advocating "keep us in the dark and feed us bullshit."

There's nothing wrong with well-founded and thoughtful criticism. On the other hand, it is very easy for this to turn into personal attacks or bullying - even if it wasn't intended to be.

If you're not careful you'll end up with juniors copying the style and phrasing of less-carefully-worded messages of their tech demigod, and you end up with a huge hostile workplace behaviour cesspit.

It's the same reason why Linus Torvalds took a break to reflect on his communication style: no matter how strongly you feel about a topic, you can't let your emotions end up harming the community.

So yes, I can totally see poorly-worded critiques leading to HR complaints. Having to think twice about the impact of the things you write is an essential part of being at a high level in a company, you simply can't afford to be careless anymore.

It's of course impossible to conclude that this is what happened in this specific case without further details, but it definitely wouldn't be the first time something like this happened with a tech legend.

Historically? The internet, the concept of a graphical user interface, the mouse, the smartphone, the LCD display, the laser printer...

It's about clever people trying weird stuff, and occasionally ending up with a world-changing idea. Asking for examples of to-be-discovered innovations is, by definition, an impossibility.

What is an easy gate task to get into “reverse engineering some drivers for some OS”?

Second thought: I don’t even know how to write a driver or a kernel, so I better start from there.

* Those that are are only loaded when needed

It's not that bad

Everyone wants to make an OS because that's super cool and technical and hard. I mean, that's just resume gold.

Using Linux is boring and easy. Yawwwwn. But nobody makes an OS from scratch, only crazy greybeard developers do that!

The problem is, you're not crazy greybeard developers working out of your basement for the advancement of humanity. No. Youre paid employees of a mega corporation. You have no principles, no vision. You're not Linus Trovalds.

There weird hagiographies need to go. Carmack is absolutely not known to be kind. I have no idea what happened here but the idea that's he's this kindly old grandpa who could never, ever be rude or unprofessional is really out there.

"I think that your team shouldn't even exist" doesn't mean "I want your team to no longer exist.".

Not the parent, but of course they're wasting their time... That's the point of a hobby OS.

I'm working on a hobby OS, and I have no illusions that it's most likely fewer than 10 people will ever run it, and less than 100 will hear about it, but it lets me explore some interesting (to me) ideas, and forces me to learn a little more about random pieces of computing. If I ran on GCP, I'd want the reboot button to work. That sounds useful.

On the topic, I don't see why anyone would want to build a general purpose OS. There's enough already and even with the shrinking of hardware variety, there's a lot of stuff to support to make a general purpose OS work on enough hardware for people to consider using it. You can take Linux or a BSD and hack it up pretty good to explore a lot of OS ideas. Chances are you're going to borrow some of their drivers anyway, and then you'll end up with at least some similarity... may as well start there and save a lot of time. (My hobby OS has a custom kernel and custom drivers, but I only support a bare minimum of devices... (pc) console i/o, one real NIC, and virtio-net... that's all I need; I might add support for more NICs and more consoles later)

It makes absolutely zero financial sense to create a new general purpose operating system.

That's billions of lines of code. With a B. And that's just the code - getting it to work with hardware?

Do YOU want to talk to 10,000 hardware vendors and get them on board? No! Nobody does! That's just money burning!

But, there are valid political reasons for creating a new general purpose OS.

You don't know someone or how they really behave because they are a public figure.

I've had to coach people and help them understand the entitlement involved in demanding that everyone adjust and adhere to their personal preferences and communication style. In my experience, it's about seeking to understand the person and adapt accordingly. Not everyone is willing to do that.

Why is complaining to HR even an option on the table?

So what are we supposed to do? Just let waste continue? The entire point of engineering is to understand the tradeoffs of each decision and to be able to communicate them to others...

I don't think it's just about legality. Whether the recommendation letter is included in the application is at the distinction of the applicant. When you want it to reach the next company, you must write is so, that the former employee considers it to be a good recommendation.

If it uses bluetooth, which it might for the controller?, the permission for bluetooth on Android is fine location --- the same permission as for using GPS. That might be the same permission you need for wifi stuff, too? Because products and services exist to turn bluetooth and wifi mac addresses seen into a fine location.

But who knows what they do with the GPS signal after they ask for it?

On well-functioning teams, product feedback shouldn't have to be filtered through layers of management. In fact, it would be dishonest to discuss something like this with managers while hiding it from the rest of the team.

I mean, if you're working on a project that is likely to fail, wouldn't it be nice if someone gave you cover to stop working on it, and then you could figure out something else to do that might not fail? Can't get any impact if your OS will never ship.

I even found myself letting really bad things go by because it was just going to take way to much of my time to spoon feed people and get them to stop.

Their CPU, their boards, their firmware (presumably), their OS[1], much of the perhipherals are theirs, too.

Lots of companies try to emulate Apple, but it's very hard to pull off.

[1] Yes, they use some parts from Mach and FreeBSD in their OS, but the amalgamation is theirs, and they support and change the whole thing as needed.

They aren't trying to get reboot to work, they are trying to get their version of kexec to work so their hobby os reboots faster.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kexec

The biggest scam in the OS world is drivers, we should demand more out of our hardware. Drivers shouldn't be necessary.

If he doesn’t believe in something, he can sometimes be over critical and it’s hard to push back in that kind of power imbalance.

Imagine being able to build an operating system, basically the end-game of being a programmer, and get PAID for it. Then some nerd tells on you.

If I’m kinda sensitive but also hyper-ambitious, I acknowledge that Facebook has

1. Some of the highest pay in the industry. 2. Ultra-competitive environment. 3. Low moral principles.

Seems like the strategy would be to use every lever at your disposal to manipulate your environment, rather than leave and risk getting paid less.

This is Meta. Let the kids build their operating system ffs. Is he now more concerned with protecting shareholder value? Who cares.

There is a difference between “this project is not going to work” vs “these people are incompetent and the project should be cancelled as a result”. The former needs to be said, the latter is a HR violation.

Damn, I'd pay to work in some serious OS/Compiler teams, but hey why should they hire me? Oh well...Yeah I'm doing a bit of projects on my side but man I'm so burnt out by my 9am-5pm $$ job + 5pm-10pm kid job that I barely have any large chunk of time to work on those.

That's obviously the wrong message. They should say "Go ask the engineering VP to get us off any other projects for another cycle while we're writing 'satisfying' documentation".

Extensive documentation comes at a price few companies are willing to pay (and that's not just a matter of resources. Look at Apple's documentation)

Not sure what the situation is for other hardware like NVMe SSDs.

[0] 2750 page datasheet for the e810 Ethernet controller https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/content-details/6138...

I don't see why a kexec alike wouldn't work about the same on GCP vs qemu vs bare metal... Or what that has to do with a GCP soft reboot button (which again, I think is referring to the reboot button in the GCP console)

Either way, the whole thing is a waste of time, yes? Why not waste time on the part that's engaging?

> The biggest scam in the OS world is drivers, we should demand more out of our hardware. Drivers shouldn't be necessary.

I can't even fathom what you mean here? You've got to have some interface to communicate with hardware. That's a driver. Some hardware only needs a very small driver... Tell the hardware where to send input, how to notify when input is ready and when its ready for output, and tell the hardware where data to output is. Maybe some setup stuff for modes and whatever if the needs aren't obvious and universal. I don't see how you could possibly avoid that.

It would certainly be possible for more devices to use common interfaces so a single driver could operate many different devices. Maybe that's what you mean? There's some movement towards that... SATA controllers generally speak AHCI, human interface devices generally appear as USB HID devices, etc. NICs tend to have a wide variety of setup sequences, but data queues usually fit into one of a limited number of patterns.

It helps to have a concept to guide you too, but you can certainly make some progress on the basics before you figure out what you really want to do.

[1] https://wiki.osdev.org/User:Zesterer/Bare_Bones

[2] https://osdev.wiki/wiki/Multiboot1_Bare_Bones

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52hMWMWKAMk&t=1s

This is a guy who figures that what he wants to do most with his 3 free weekends is to port his latest, greatest engine to a Cortex-A8. Leading corporate strategy? Maybe not. But Carmack on efficiency? Just do it.

Realistically for the OEM to debug the issue they're going to need a way to reliably repro which we don't have for them, so we're kind of stuck.

This type of problem generalizes to the development of drivers and firmware for many complex pieces of modern hardware.

In theory, it’s better to sleep early, get up around 5 and get 2 hours of quality time, but man he sometimes gets up around 6:15 and earlier, and I found it difficult to get good sleep anyway, so I tried to switch to 2 hours of night time, but he wants to sleep with me for 30 mins around 9pm before going to my wife’s bed, and I usually fell sleep sooner than he did…

Girls are much easier to raise. They sleep earlier and don’t fight too much, as far as I heard from friends.

That scale is when creating an OS gives you a clear advantage over licensing or working with an open source OS.

Every other scale below that it's for knowledge, growth, research, or fun.

It doesn't sound like he's concerned with waste. It sounds like it's a typical Carmack argument - distilled and hyper logical, and his conclusion is more to do with the pointlessness of it. He actually concedes the point that the project may have been highly efficient (which it may or may not have been, he was steelmanning).

His main points seemed to be:

If every cycle matters and efficiency is paramount, just make the project monolithic C++ code. If every cycle matters, that is somewhat incompatible with general purpose OSs, and if it doesn't, the existing landscape is more than good enough. Presumably, he's calling out the absurdity of counter-arguments which are being unrealistic about the objectives of creating a new general purpose OS, while also focusing on extreme efficiency. He states that the requirements to fully achieve these objectives would require a "monastic coding enclave" like Plan 9 OS, and it wasn't realistic even with the high talent in Meta.

And that plays into the second point, which seems to essentially be "new OSs aren't a draw for developers, they are a burden". This is painfully obvious when looking at the history of OSs and software, and it's the obvious reason why "let the kids build their operating system ffs" should result in a reflexive "noooo..." from the greybeards. The deeper point though is that if A. is achieved, the B. Burden on devs will be even more onerous. Therefore unless the entire project is committed to truly moving crowds to new paradigms (good luck, literally billions have been lost here), just use the proven, faily high performance options that have widespread support.

The conclusion is "on balance, it's a bad idea." He's arguing it sharply (although I understand a Carmack steelman is intimidating to attack), but in essence it's a fairly banal and conservative conclusion, backed with strong precedent.

If I understand the hypothetical you've proposed, my advice would be for you to adapt and learn to be less sensitive rather than have you believe that you can manipulate the environment, or worse, directly manipulate people.

It's possible that you could be a positive influence for change, so I don't want to completed discount any effort there, but I also think it's worth being realistic about what you can actually affect.

John Carmack, David Cutler, Tom West, Cameron Zwarich, etc. There are about maybe 50 of them.

Anyway, if anyone reading this gets a chance to build a custom OS for bespoke HW, and get paid FAANG salary to do so, go for it! :-D

Your sub's officers also need to constantly be aware of what to communicate to whom and in which language. Your superiors certainly kept you in the dark about a ton of concerns that were on their plate because simply mentioning them to subordinates would have been too distracting.

> If the platform really needs to watch every cycle that tightly, you aren't going to be a general purpose platform, and you might as well just make a monolithic C++ embedded application, rather than a whole new platform that is very likely to have a low shelf life as the hardware platform evolves.

Which I think is agreeable, up to a certain point, because I think it's potentially naive. That monolithic C++ embedded application is going to be fundamentally built out of a scheduler, IO and driver interfaces, and a shell. That's the only sane way to do something like this. And that's an operating system.

They had amazing talent. Seriously, some of the most brilliant engineers I've worked with.

They had a huge team. Hundreds of people.

It was so ambitious.

But it seemed like such a terrible idea from the start. Nobody was ever able to articulate who would ever use it.

Technically, it was brilliant. But there was no business plan.

If they wanted to build a new kernel that could replace Linux on Android and/or Chrome OS, that would have been worth exploring - it would have had at least a chance at success.

But no, they wanted to build a new OS from scratch, including not just the kernel but the UI libraries and window manager too, all from scratch.

That's why the only platform they were able to target was Google's Home Hub - one of the few Google products that had a UI but wasn't a complete platform (no third-party apps, for example). And even there, I don't think they had a compelling story for why their OS was worth the added complexity.

It boggles my mind that Fuchsia is still going on. They should have killed it years ago. It's so depressing that they did across-the-board layoffs, including taking away resources from critically underfunded teams, while leaving projects like Fuchsia around wasting time and effort on a worthless endeavor. Instead they just kept reducing Fuchsia while still keeping it going. For what?

These were my imaginations. I thought maybe an OS that could run on the web. Or an OS that could be virtualized to run on several machines. Or an OS that could be run along several other instances on the same machine each catering to a different user.

But like it works for Musk and Trump, and probably hundreds of other leaders today, why not take their example? (Assuming again, your highly ambitious and competitive, I’m more pro social, so I’d take your route)

This is legitimately something I’ve been asking myself lately, we talk about a world that values one thing ( rationality, respect, pro social behavior) but reward another (pettiness, vindictive, selfishness). Why do we pretend?

Also, and maybe the most important point, John Carmack is 100% trying to manipulate his environment and people, that’s why he’s so successful!

The world is literally run by people who are good at manipulating people and their environment. That’s what an entrepreneur is, that’s what a politician is, that’s what an artist is. Your argument seems to mostly be people shouldn’t try to manipulate the world in a way that I don’t like.

I mean maybe, but maybe Carmac is just an ass hole... He can be a "legend" in the software development world and also just not be a super great person socially. The two things aren't mutually exclusive.

I don't disagree with you entirely, but being "direct" isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card for poor interpersonal skills. It's not always about "fragile egos" or "entitlement", it's about basic professionalism and communication.

(Mind you, Carmack himself was responsible for Oculus' Scheme-based VRScript exploratory-programming environment, another Meta-funded passion project that didn't end up going far. It surely didn't cost remotely as much as XROS though.)

Why the fuck is he even hired there if you are not going to listen to him.

Dude has forgotten more things about game development than you will ever know...

(Actually I just realised you meant "buy")

XROS was an org that hired for specific specialist positions (as opposed to the usual "get hired into FB, go through the bootcamp, and find your place within the company"). At one point we got two separate requests from the recruiting execs: - Your tech screen pass rate is way too low compared to other teams at FB. Please consider making your tech screen easier to expand the pool of candidates. - Your interview-to-offer rate is way too low compared to other teams at FB. Please consider making your tech screen more difficult to reduce time that engineers spend on interviewing and writing feedback.

Anyway, IMO it was a very strong team in a very wrong environment. Most of the folks on the team hated the Facebook culture, despised the PSC process (despite having no problems with delivering impact in a greenfield project), had very little respect for non-technical managers coming from FB proper (the XROS team saw themselves as part of Oculus), and the majority I believe fled to other companies as soon as the project was scrapped. The pay was good however, and the work was very interesting. My overall impression was that most people on the team saw XROS as a journey, not a destination, and it was one of the reasons why it was destined to never ship.

100% agree with your points. To me watching I was like -- yeah, hell, yeah, working on an OS from scratch sounds awesome, those guys have an awesome job. Too bad they're making everyone else's job suck.

This way, good documentation is priced into my estimate for the project. I don't have a work item "spend a few days documenting." Nope, if I'm doing a foo then that includes documenting a foo at the same time.

The drivers are the hard part. It takes a lot of inter-industry collaboration to get driver compatibility

Of course, your custom kernel will still have to have some of its own code to support core platform/chipset devices, but LKL should pretty much cover just about all I/O devices (and you also get stuff like disk filesystems and a network stack along with the device drivers).

Also, it probably wouldn't work so well for typical monolithic kernels, but it should work decently on something that has user-mode driver support.

I am sure Carmack himself encourages debates and discussions. Lionizing one person can't be expected of every employee (unless that person is also the founder or the company is tiny).

I agree you need a driver but for most hardware, that should be pretty simple, and easily documented by the hardware vendor, shouldn't it? A button has to be about the simplest possible I/O device imaginable.

thus calling into question why you ever bothered writing a new kernel in the first place if you were just going to piggyback Linux's device drivers onto some userspace wrapper thingy.

Im not necessarily indoctrinated to the point where I can't conceive of Linux being suboptimal in a way which is so fundamental that it requires no less than a completely new OS from scratch but you're never going to get there off of recycling linux's device drivers because that forces you to design your new OS as a linux clone in which cade you definitely did not need to write an entire new kernel from scratch.

In total across the entire US federal government, $518.8 million was paid to Microsoft for products and services in 2024. That is approximately 0.21% of their total annual revenue.

I assert that the threshold for "state sponsored" is well in excess of 0.21% of annual revenue.

Federal Spending: https://www.usaspending.gov/recipient/dd77b7c3-663e-cb91-229...

Microsoft Annual Revenue: https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar24/index.html

Of course, ACPI is supposed to make interfacing with lots of similar things easier, kind of, so there you go.

Interestingly, he was pulling the same bs at Google until reason prevailed and he got pushed out (but allowed to save face and claim he resigned willingly[1]).

[0] https://x.com/yewnyx/status/1793684535307284948 [1] https://x.com/marklucovsky/status/1678465552988381185

  > you're never going to get there off of recycling linux's device drivers because that forces you to design your new OS as a linux clone in which cade you definitely did not need to write an entire new kernel from scratch.

probably it would have to be very general in design, but something along the lines of driverkit or iokit might work?

If you want to be the dominant player in the market in 10-15 years, build the OS and keep funding it.

Yes, you can produce a small amount of code faster if you don’t “waste” your time on documentation, but that becomes counterproductive as soon as you can no longer keep the entire codebase in your head.

This is one of the reasons I’m sick of working pretty much anywhere anymore: I can’t be myself.

Appreciating people for their differences when they are humble and gifted is easy. I side with liberals, but I have a mix of liberal, moderate, and conservative friends.

But there are only so many years of pretending to appreciate all of the self-focused people that could be so much better at contributing to the world if they could quietly and selflessly work hard and respect people with different beliefs and backgrounds.

I’m happy for the opportunity I have to work, and I understand how millennials think and work. But working with boomers and/or gen X-ers would be so much less stressful. I could actually have real conversations with people.

I don’t think the problem is really with HR. I think the problem is a generation that was overly pandered to just doesn’t mix with the other generations, and maybe they shouldn’t.

FWIW I like carmack from what I have seen publically (and Romero, who I have interacted with) but I wouldn’t pretend to know who either of them really are from my observation of them.

Sorry if I wasn’t clear; this was the point I was actually trying to make. Direct and to the point should not a HR incident make. I was trying to contrast with something that would.

Or it’s an appeal to authority in that if a person of authority says it then they must be right so there’s no reason to push back in the first place.

Much of the scenarios they tried to address could have been done with Mach or some realtime kernel or with fuchsia. I recall later on they did consider using fuchsia as the user space for the os for some time.

On another note, there was similarly an equally “just for fun” language effort in the org as well (eg “FNL”). That was also conceived by a bunch of randos who weren’t a bunch of compiler guys that had no product vision and just did it for fun.

Well when the era of efficiency arrived all of this stuff ended.

and also, it wasn't enough to "win" against a den-of-wolves place filled with power-players like meta.

Fwiw inventing a new application ecosystem has never been a goal and is therefore not a limitation for its viability. The hard part is just catching up to all the various technologies everyone takes for granted on typical systems. But it's not insurmountable.

I'm also not sold on the idea that having more options is ever a bad thing. People always talk about web browser monoculture and cheer on new entrants, yet no one seems to mind the os monoculture. We will all come out ahead if there are more viable OS out there to use.

Do you know that that's what's going on here?

a little bit a negative feedback at high level can domino quickly too. massive pivots, reorgs, the works.

I'm not saying that there's no space for direct communication and that everyone needs to be formal and socially polite during every interaction. But I've met many people who act like you describe John does who very much do not appreciate getting it back, implying some level of awareness that their directness is hurtful on occasion.

I've only met a few direct people who can take it as well.

Dude just seemed frustrated with the lack of attention to things that mattered.

But...that honestly tracks with Meta's past and present.

3 main OSes vs 2 main browser engine for consumer to choose from?

Anyway the main issue with the Browser engine consolidation is that whoever owns the Browser engine, can make or break what goes in there. Just think about VSCode's current status with all the AI companies wanting to use it and make it their own product, while MSFT attempting to curtail it. At some point either MSFT decide it commit to FOSS on this one, or the multiple forks will have to reimplement some functionalities.