styx

This is a draft document outlining some of my thought process going into the styx standards track. Some of this MAY be adopted in the future or revisited, revised or eliminated as we identify changes to be made with this procedure and proposal.

🚧⚠️ There are empty headings with no text, there are unfinished sentences and paragraphs, and even a Trivia section. Don't say we didn't warn you.

Nothing here is normative, formative or declared as standard to the styx project, its stewardship or leadership, as of the current date of printing.

A future proposal and document may follow that contains all or part of this document.

(I think we're the first OS in twenty years to use one! I know Debian did, at least.)

we also fixed the font rendering issues on the website, by replacing Atkinson Hyperlegible (the cohost font) with plain sans-serif.

also in the pipeline:

• a draft post outlining "styx enhancement proposals". this wasn't actually going to get very far before the website closes out, so I figure I'll post what I got so far
• a new, more lightweight blog and frontend for styx-os.org - should be ready by the 1st
• the new styx systems tool, codenamed 'hydra' - keep an eye out, it's a big 'un!

styx takes a pro-"Program", anti-"App" stance to its own software. We won't forbid "apps", that's silly, but we won't be making our stuff an "app" for sure.

But on the flip side - I want styx and its own software to be approachable to the common person - as if it were an "app", where possible, excluding fine technical tunings and things like that.

Ideally, styx does what Mac OS X Server tried to do, when it comes to services and plug-in functionality - making it manageable, visible, and workable from a familiar and discoverable frontend.

styx being a consent-first OS¹, means that the way apps update is a process you have control over. We want to ensure good forward- and roll-back compatibility for user configurations, too, but I think a better spot for that would be snapshotting and differential/transactional configuration management and access through styx's etcfs² management.

In our repos, we will keep differential history for app sources perpetually, if possible; and for binaries, as long as is reasonable. This also owes to the importance of software freedom³ - as a means to present to the user a better promise of consent and autonomy over their own systems.

(If you're reading this from the website: see the parent post on Cohost for more opinion on this matter.)

1. See: "styx is a consent-first operating system."

2. [TODO: a post on etcfs!] We are planning on managing /etc/ in styx as a virtual filesystem backed by a database, more akin to the Windows Registry than a true filesystem. /etc/ remains where it is, for compatibility, in a virtual directory mount; but styx-aware programs and dconf interfaces can directly handle setting entries through our configuration management API.

3. See: "On software freedom and styx"

... but cohost.org is soon going to be.

For one thing, we are probably the first, and will be the last, Linux distro and/or operating system and/or utility software project to use cohost.

Wait. What's a cohost again?

(Since you're reading this on cohost, you can probably skip this paragraph. )

If you've never heard of cohost: It is a rather interesting and independent personal blog/social media site that, unusually for places nowadays, has no third-party cookies, tracking, analytics or network advertising (they had an "artist alley", a sort of classifieds page), and has exhibited a keen and sharp focus on user trust, safety, and creativity.

Currently, our blog at https://styx-os.org/ is a mirror of our cohost blog, at https://cohost.org/styx-os/ - which, with the lovely cohost-blogger software by @oatmealine, has been a fantastic way to put up posts and comments on our own site, in a way that is moderated and minimally-impactful.

We will be moving this blog onto our own servers over the coming month, as cohost's posting deadline (October 1) looms, and the final site shutdown (December 31) nears.