alcinnz, 24 days ago

Since early on, the fediverse passed this popquiz! And kept accurate as votes came in. Well done!

And I gather some of the "speech synthesis" votes were cast because you don't appreciate how hard these feature are sometimes pushed.

From studying GNOME/GNU/Linux none of these are simple (despite what some may think) but time takes by far the most effort! Consisting of font selection, text wrapping, font parsing, rasterization, normalizing multilingual text direction, & so much more!

LovesTha, 24 days ago

@alcinnz Rethinking it: Time is the only one of these options I have a hard time thinking a functional OS must include. The other three are optional in certain types of OS

alcinnz, 24 days ago

@LovesTha Even then, I'm sure there's types of OSes who could get by with just treating time as a count of seconds...

Avoiding much of the syncing, rendering, & parsing complexity I had in mind!

LovesTha, 24 days ago

@alcinnz Yeah, boot count + seconds since boot does work for many systems.

seindal, 1 month ago

@alcinnz I would have guessed drivers and hardware support, which is often 90% of an OS.

alcinnz, 1 month ago

@seindal Definitely! Arguably an OS does little else, practically everything serves the end goal of hardware support!

A bit too obvious of an answer to include in the poll...

LovesTha, 1 month ago

@alcinnz only voting against speech synthesis because that shouldn't be part of an OS

alcinnz, 1 month ago

@LovesTha Depends on who you're serving...

For some its vital. For most (depending on how the OS uses it) its a nuisance.