Hello Fellow Genodians!
Thank you Norman for continuing this enjoyable and enlightening tradition! Could you post this over on Discourse as well, since there might be different people there, and we can be chattier without disturbing the S/N ratio here?
Reflection of 2025 ------------------
It's been another exciting year, for all the reasons you mentioned! Here are a few of the things that resonated with me personally:
- Goa / Genode-World The advances in Goa make everything so much easier, and the Genode-World reorganization around Goa makes a lot of sense. Can't wait to play with it! (See "Ambitions" section below.)
- 25.10 Multi-Kernel Image I absolutely love the multi-kernel boot image! It is really interesting to be able to run the same configuration on different kernels so easily. Please make these for every release!
- Great API Hardening / Eliminating Exceptions Anything that moves errors from run-time to compile-time is near and dear to my heart! I wasn't aware of this pattern before, but I'm looking forward to using it in practice.
- Multi-Monitor / Display Rotation These are both useful and fun! I haven't been taking much advantage of either so far, but I plan to make the most of both going forward.
- HID This is an interesting development, that grows on me the more I look at it. (More in "Ambitions" below.)
Ambitions for 2026 ------------------
I am "all in" on the concept of "Building Bridges". Even though I've had a couple of disappointing years, I really hope to work on the following in 2026, most of which fit this theme:
- VSCodium Extension This one may be useful to others also, and it has the advantage of being pretty simple. My vision is a couple of extensions, one for the traditional build system and one for Goa. I am still gathering ideas of exactly what these would provide, but I will definitely try my hand at HID syntax highlighting. I will create a topic on Discourse to share my thoughts and get ideas from others also.
- Daily Driver / Framework 16 After several false starts, I am going to seriously try to make Sculpt my "daily driver", and gradually move functionality out of Linux VMs and into native Genode apps. I plan on getting a Framework 16 any day now, so I will try to be helpful on getting the most out of that hardware as well.
- PinePhone PDA / Games I often miss the simplicity of PDAs, like the Palm Pilot or Newton (with stylus, not finger, but that's another question for another time). To this end, I would really like to use Goa to port (or write!) some simple apps to the PinePhone, to recreate this experience. Wish me luck! :^)
Questions ---------
Could you elaborate a little bit about the following items from your "Ambitions" section?
- "Capability-based desktop environment" - what would this entail?
- "GUI session VFS plugin" - what sort of information would you be exposing through the VFS?
Thanks again for sharing this with all of us!
Happy Sculpting!
John J. Karcher devuser@alternateapproach.com