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Plaupius on 06 August 2008
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dib8rman said:

@WoW

Funny thing is I don't disagree with him on his definition of what an OS is.

>.>

 

Edit - It's hard to image that this all started from me saying I believe XMB would be easier than Mac OSX for me if Home were to be the first virtual OS and it used XMB in a similar fashion to Windows desktop.

Ok, I'll try to advance this discussion/debate a bit. Though I'm still not sure what you mean by virtual OS, but it sounds it's not what it is usually thought to mean:

Definition of virtual operating system: An operating system that can host other operating systems. See virtual machine. source

Anyway, if we assume that Home would indeed become something resembling an operating system, that would mean that it would have to have the ability to run applications that have some sort of a user interface. It might be possible to adapt XMB to most kinds of applications, but probably not all. Anyway, as the number of applications increases (as devs make more apps for the Home OS), the XMB has to be able to support all of those new apps. Now, I know a few things about designing user interfaces, and I'm pretty sure that the user experience you get from XMB would detoriarate quite fast as the number of options increases. That is the problem with all menu-driven interfaces. So, the XMB you have now would be quite different from the XMB that you would use to control the Home OS. And that is the point I have been trying to get across, albeit not in a very direct manner. User interfaces are always designed to a specific purpose (or at least they should be designed, but we all know a plethora of apps just slap the controls in and are done with it), and the wider the purpose, the harder it is to design an easy user interface. There are ways to alleviate the problems caused by a wide range of possibilities/options, but the XMB approach does not, IMO, scale particularily well upwards. Anyway, I don't know if the above was even in the ballpark of what you mean by a virtual OS, so if you could clarify I'd appreciate it. Who knows, with a bit of thinking and discussion we can arrive at some sort of mutual understanding.