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 OS (see J2), 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 etcfs (1) 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 freedom (see J3) - as a means to present to the user a better promise of consent and autonomy over their own systems.

(See the parent post on Cohost (content warning: "fuck computers") for more opinion on this matter.)

Footnotes:

1. Re: "etcfs":

[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.

Original post, reply-chain and comments:

mirrored from our cohost post: https://cohost.org/styx-os/post/3322954-programs-not-apps
published 2024-09-23 at 4:24AM America/New_York time

replying to a cohost post from cathoderaydude: https://cohost.org/cathoderaydude/post/1484184-fuck-all-apps
(content warning: "fuck computers")

No comments on cohost.