James-Livesey

Very neat — been looking for something like this! I've just signed up. Feels great to be part of this little social space!

Just a few questions:

1. Have you thought about adding an API? I can see myself submitting things to this site more if I could somehow integrate it with VSCode so that I can create a new post after having pushed a commit.

2. Have you also thought about adding a comments system, much like we have here on HN? I think that could be useful to allow people to ask questions about projects others are working on. I can see this site almost being like Show HN, but without the expectation that projects are in a finished state. Just wondering what your take is on that though!

3. Would it be useful to have some sort of categorisation functionality (like hashtags)? That way, smaller communities around specific niches (such as game dev, frontend, systems dev) can form and would allow you to see more posts that you're interested in.

These are just a few ideas I have — don't feel that you're obliged to take them onboard as I understand that there might be a certain direction you want to take this site!

When faced with a similar situation and come up with multiple potential solutions — such as settling for older Adobe software versus creating your own resource-efficient graphics application, I'd definitely take the more creative and fun solution over the quick and simple one! Interesting how people's approaches vary in this way.

(That does change somewhat when doing paid work though...)

True, but any competing operating system could just falsely report that it is running x86-64 and therefore trick YouTube into serving high-res content.

Disclosure: currently (as a personal project) slowly building an alternative to Android

With mentioning that while I was still interested in programming and even had a Pi before I got my micro:bit, I'd say that the micro:bit did introduce me to microcontroller development.

As much as the Raspberry Pi is really great for computing education, in my personal opinion, I think the micro:bit does well in terms of setting it up and getting started with it, especially in a school environment when there'll be around 20-or-so of these devices all being used by students.

With the Pi, you have to format the SD card and flash an OS to it, then plug in the peripherals such as the display, keyboard and mouse. While schools will likely have this equipment, having to reconnect all these devices from a school PC can be a chore, especially when it comes to the end of the lesson. Schools would likely also have to issue a lot of these peripherals alongside Pis for kids to use them as their only computer in the house, and that can get expensive.

With the micro:bit, all you need is a computer (which most schools will have), a USB cable (supplied with micro:bits) and a connection to the internet to access the online IDEs. Granted, that does place some barriers to their use at home when kids don't have a companion computing device for coding on.

Despite the micro:bit being limited as a microcontroller with a 5x5 pixel display and 2 user buttons, it does have a lot of on-board sensors that can bring a lot of potential opportunities to students in terms of creating physical projects that Raspberry Pis don't have built-in (you have to purchase external sensors, such as accelerometers, to match the functionality).

That being said, the micro:bit does require a special connector to use its GPIO pins in a DIP format that can be connected to a breadboard (the Pi is better at this due to its GPIO header). And, while the Pi does give a full-blown Linux environment that would have been great for all learners to interact with, the immediacy and portability of the micro:bit does have some advantages for new learners.

I was in fact in Year 5 back when the micro:bit was launched and given out to Year 5 school children, and now I'm an apprentice at the BBC (similar stories exist for the original BBC Micro); so I'd say in that respect that it was overall a good investment from the BBC :)

That's my thoughts, anyway!

Yeah I understand, there are certainly a lot of interfaces out there that are built on the web and because of all the JS they use, they can feel really clunky. The reason why using the web as a platform for this system is because it is — in my opinion — the most viable tool we have at the moment to build cross-platform apps and services that work on all modern desktop computers and mobile devices from the same codebase (that is, without having to go down the React Native or Flutter route).

I do consider performance issues with the web to be quite serious, which is why I've avoided large JS frameworks such as React, Angular, Vue etc. and have gone for a lightweight one that was made specifically for the project (mainly as an experiment). The results do show: the system is rather responsive on an original PinePhone (and I should imagine is really smooth on a PinePhone Pro due to its much better specs), and you can get to the LiveG OS lock screen within 10 seconds of booting the system in VirtualBox.

But yeah, I do see what you mean by the web being... clunky in general. You say about the web being "fragile" and "a house of cards built on shifting sands", and yeah, the culture around developing web services has largely been to use waaay too many dependencies to achieve simple tasks.

Oh wow, didn't know that dahliaOS had this! The only barrier that I can see would prevent this from happening for gShell is that web browsers don't support the `webview` element that Electron lets you use (it's basically an iframe but without all the CORS restrictions and the likes, so you can see why browsers don't support it). I suppose one cool side-project would be to set up a service similar to Microsoft's Windows 365 that would stream a desktop environment to something like a `canvas` element — that way, we could get around all the CORS stuff.

Also, yeah what Canonical did with Ubuntu and Ubuntu Touch is pretty cool in terms of convergence (apparently it's really stable, too). I do find having the sidebar UI on mobile a bit odd, but I should imagine that it'd be something to get used to. Phosh and KDE Mobile I think are both convergent, too.