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

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521 points OlympicMarmoto | 3 comments | 29 Aug 25 16:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.51s | source
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greggman65 ◴[29 Aug 25 17:47 UTC] No.45067229[source]▶
And yet, Sony did it, Nintendo did it, both have been pretty succeesful.

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.

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1. mschuster91 ◴[29 Aug 25 18:15 UTC] No.45067562[source]▶
Sony and Nintendo both forked off of either NetBSD or FreeBSD. Sony's cameras at least up until the A7S2 run Linux (there's jailbreaks for these), although I never found any kernel / bootloader dump like it would be required.

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

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2. mwkaufma ◴[29 Aug 25 18:26 UTC] No.45067691[source]▶
Sony forked FreeBSD, but Nintendo didn't. They have BSD license headers because of some BSD socket code they include.
3. numpad0 ◴[29 Aug 25 18:59 UTC] No.45068030[source]▶
Sony cameras all run Linux. Models with "PlayMemories Camera Apps" feature like A7M2 support runs Android userland on top. It's probably easier to count the cameras that don't(like old Olympus).