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I'm thrilled to announce the availability of the Trianglix Desktop Environment, Spring 2014 prototype release!

Trianglix is an orthogonal multi-user secure self-hosting Triangle System written entirely from scratch! This is the realization of the vision for the Graphical User-Interface of my operating system, Sortix. This is the fruit of hard work since 2011, where the original design principles for Trianglix was proposed. The Trianglix Desktop Environment is literally a revolutionary new experience based on scientific data gathered from weekly testing sessions. It stands up against the awful Windows and OS X experiences that everyone are cloning and completely redefines the general-purpose computing environment with new superior concepts.

Implementation

Trianglix uses the paradigm that everything is a triangle, in stark contrast to the Unix principle that everything is a file. Each triangle has three edges (input, output and error) and represents a Turing-computable triangular function, expressed through well-formed Triscript written in Runes and senary digits. Triscript is a powerful and expressive language unlike anything ever developed before. It doesn't belong in the classic categories of programming languages such as imperative or functional, but is perhaps best described as angular flow-like esoteric programming. The system is implemented as a series of executable triangle servers wrapped around the all-powerful core Trinit root triangle, which is built upon the kernel angular virtual machine.

Security is provably correct and the system administrator sets forth the policy. The Trinit server (written in unverified Triscript) verifies its wrapping triangles to esnsure the angular descriptions uphold the triangle inequality and the various Pythagorean properties.

The system is self-documenting and display useful diagnostics targeted at the system administrator and average user. The current triangular state is constantly visualized as a revolving polygon of actions built from invisible triangles centered around the root triangle (keyboard), which also acts as a compatibility Unix command interpreter on filesystem triangles.

This 2014 prototype of Trianglix is constructed as a personality upon the Sortix operating system, in parallel to the traditional Unix experience that ships with Sortix. Indeed, the Unix environment is accessible and merges somewhat well with the Trianglix environment in the name of compatibility. This has allowed us to recycle the existing compiler infrastructure available on Sortix and the system is self-building.

Scientific Design

Trianglix has been systematically designed from the ground up as a novel user experience while disregarding all established and flawed existing knowledge on usability. The project originally began as a large number of prototype operating systems, each exploring user interface concepts completely orthogonal to existing experiences. These esoteric prototypes has polished and merged into what is now known as Trianglix, through the use of weekly testing sessions during all of 2013 and early 2014.

The current studies from late March 2014 shows that Trianglix delivers the intended user-experience. Remarkably, the metaphors and concepts employed tend to be so unfamiliar to the average computer user that they are stunned with indecision as they can apply none of their existing computer skills. Preliminary work has begun on a compatibility mode where the system trains unfamiliar users basic skills during the first few minutes. Research shows testers did not benefit from more than basic usage information. Indeed, users could not be told how Trianglix works, or even shown it, they had to try it for fifteen minutes themselves before discovering and becoming comfortable with the hidden features.

The system will eventually have a touch interface, but the work is incomplete, and instead navigation and computation is done using the keyboard. There is absolutely no mouse control because a mouse (with and even without scroll-wheel) cannot be accurately be represented as a triangle or angular unit without it being a leaky abstraction. The system is internationalized and starts in a linguistic compatibility mode until new users has had a chance to adapt to the new linguistic and alphabetical concepts that aid in triangular computation.

Entertainment

This prototype release ships with exciting games such as asteroids and quake. It even comes with C and C++ compilers and a full development environment. The more advanced users can benefit from doing their advanced computation through the special Trinit Core environment, where users has full and raw access into the Trianglix internals (not recommended for novice users as they can inadvertently cause massive system damage).

Future

This is still an early prototype, and while it is perfectly usable for office work or home entertainment, it is a very good representation of the design ideals that drive our ground-breaking user-interface work. Much of the effort has been spent on capturing the classic asteroids and quake games as triangular constructions, as opposed to being programs written in imperative C.

The Trinit Core is implemented as an emotional state engine and visualizes its stability as emotions expressed by the central root triangle object. Users can thus discern whether system administration is required by examining whether the root triangle seems happy or angry. The core also keeps track of user emotion by examining the user's typing speed, which allows it to determine the user's confidence. Advanced features are deliberately hidden from users that do not act with the sufficient confidence. This implements the What You Feel Is What You Get design principle. In the future we wish to enhance the experience and protect against false positives by deploying facial recognition from web-cam data.

This release only comes with a basic BGA video driver, which utilizes special virtual hardware only present in particular virtual machines such as Qemu and VirtualBox. You must use one of these two virtual machines (or compatible) to run this release of Trianglix. You will not be able to succeed in properly booting it on real hardware.

Installation and More Information

You can get more information about Trianglix at the official website:

http://sortix.org/trianglix/

You can download Sortix 0.8 for x86 or x86_64 from these locations:

https://cs.au.dk/~sortie/trianglix/rele ... 01/builds/

You can download the source code for this release (with or without included third party ports) at:

https://cs.au.dk/~sortie/trianglix/rele ... 01/source/

Be sure to consult the system requirements and the known problems above.

Thanks

This release was primarily developed by me, but we'd like to thank these people for their valuable contributions and testing of this release:

• Juhani Haverinen
• Shikhin Sethi
• SirCmpwn
• reavengrey
• zeitue

And of course all the people that helped scientifically test the release and gave advise.

System Requirements

Trianglix has moderate system requirements.

• A virtual machine with BGA support, such as VirtualBox or Qemu.
• A 32-bit x86 (with SSE) or 64-bit x86_64 CPU.
• You likely need twice as much RAM as the size of the initrd, i.g. the size of the bootable disk. 1 GiB RAM is recommended.
• A harddisk or cdrom drive or support for booting from USB.
• A multiboot compliant bootloader if booting from harddisk.

Known Problems

There's a few important problems that you should know of:

• You must use Qemu or Virtualbox to access the required graphical interface.
• GRUB may simply lock up with no message if you don't provide enough memory.
• Quake save games doesn't work as printf doesn't support floating point numbers yet, you will be unable to load saved games.
• You cannot boot it in Qemu unless you pass -vga std and -m 1024 (or any suitable amount of memory, see above).
• Notice users may wish to go to |Root> |Administration> and |Disable Runes>.

Running Trianglix with QEMU

You can easily run a bootable disk image with the qemu virtual machine. Depending on which CPU you wish to emulate, run something like:

unxz sortix_0.9dev_x86_64.iso.xz &&
qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 1024 -vga std -cdrom sortix_0.9dev_x86_64.iso

Or:

unxz sortix_0.9dev_i486.iso.xz &&
qemu-system-i386 -enable-kvm -m 1024 -vga std -cdrom sortix_0.9dev_i486.iso

License

Copyright(C) Jonas 'Sortie' Termansen and contributors 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014. Trianglix is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the COPYING-GPL and COPYING-LGPL files in the source code for more information.

Yo:

10/10 - A real blast!

Just what I was looking for. My wife and I couldn't stand the desktop metaphor. I had a traumatic experience with a desk when I was five, and I have been receiving counseling with my wife. We've had a very difficult journey, and I can tell you that it came to as no small relief when we heard about Trianglix.

Thanks to Trianglix, I can now send email, organize my photos, and keep in contact with my loved ones via triangulation. Thank you Trianglix, you made life worth living again!

--A converted believer,
gravaera

Beware of Bermuda Triangles!

Bonus points can be achieved for writing not entirely from scratch but rather entirely in Scratch.

Could this be ported as a window manager for PonyOS?

The reference in your post leads to the same text as in your message. So, there is no additional information.

As it seems from the post the triangle abstraction is just an ordinary function with an exception output as a third corner. What else the triangle abstraction can offer?

Are you the reincarnation of Buckminster Fuller? If he were alive today and building operating systems he would be using triangles everywhere.
No doubt he would name it Tensegrity 2014.

Hi,

Excellent stuff! My thoughts with the Trinit Core proceeded as "ᚢᚼᛅᛏ:ᛏᛅᛋ:ᛁᛏ:ᛏᚢ᛫ᚬᚼ᛫ᚢᛁᛁᛏ᛫ᛁᚢᚢ:ᛅᚱ:ᛅ:ᛏᛋᛁᛁᚾᛁᚢᛋ᛫". I can now do things I didn't even know were possible.

Regards,
Shikhin

The triangle is furious at me, so I'd better give some feedback.
*Bender stands up and starts clapping*
I was quite impressed with the idea. When I saw the size of the ISO (~200MB) I knew what kind of system I am going to use for a while.
I like the way everything is moving on the screen, triangles rotating, menu items flowing around, random messages coming up (triangle philosophy? Didn't bother to read them though ). For me the OS looked alive, most Window managers/GUIs that we use today look idle if we don't do anything, (except the system clock and some requests for installation of _____bloat______ on your system nothing actually happens).
Cool Work!
And those who are thinking this is some "normal random GUI"

If you are too lazy to use it, you're going to miss a very cool thing in your life.
BUGS?
I haven't noticed any (hopefully). I don't think this is Trianglix Related but how do you exit from the text editor or the Asteroids game?
-Bender

This is too confusing for me. I don't see why this would be any better than the Microsoft Bob interface.

Also the access system seems weird since face recognition is only 96% accurate in humans and even Facebook's DeepFace is only 97%. I think a person like Jim Carrey would easily be able to circumvent that system by just giving his performace from The Mask.

Nope, Circles are the way to go. Just look at what google did in for G+.

It actually could be in principle. However, it would be considerable work to adapt graphical and keyboard input code from the Sortix API to the PonyOS API. Additionally, the Trianglix code assumes it is built on a Sortix system and uses Sortix libc extension that are not present in the newlib that klange is using. There is no inherent reason, however, why it can't be done. Trianglix isn't a window manager in the traditional sense, it is a triangle inspector. It visualizes the current triangle object in focus.



I deliberately duplicated most of the website content in this announcement to ensure it was seen. This post and the website is not fully identical, however. I recommend you try out Trianglix yourself to discover the full wealth of possibilities the triangle abstraction provides. In particular, it is a well-known shape with well-established properties on which the custom programming language could be build, where everything (including code and user-interface elements) are triangles. This provides an unified and consistent operating system model. From a usability point of view, triangles are also great for anthropomorphizing without applying too many human characteristics (see the assistants in particular infamous Microsoft Word releases). The consistency that everything is a triangle makes for a very good learning curve where users only have to learn a certain amount of things and then they can explore and understand the entire system in all its simplicity, albeit at the cost that novice users tend to be confused as they effectively have to relearn using their personal computer.


Oh man, that's just creepy.



Thanks

Indeed, it was a primary design principle that the user-interface would be alive and convey secondary information through emotional expressions. It's also meant to catch the attention and curiosity of bystanders.



Ah, these are inherited from the Sortix base. I believe the F1 help screen covers some of this, but basically you just ^C the asteroids game and the editor is exited with Control-Q or by typing escape and entering :q (as an aid to vim users).



Patience, this system is optimized for use by advanced users. It has a steep initial learning curve, but becomes very accessible and powerful for experienced users. Our research into usability revealed that it is preferable to design systems where users are much more powerful after taking initial training. You cannot expect to succeed at computers without taking the time to learn how to operate them.



Excellent point. The initial brainstorming came up with the work-around that we ship the facial recognition with a copy of the imdb such that we can filter away well-known comedians and Academy award winning actors. Early estimates suggest we can get all the way up to 98% accuracy.



Heresy!

<Proper Greeting Ported from brendan>

Yeah. If you could port those skills over.

<Proper Ending Ported from brendan>