Overview

Lethe is a design for a desktop operating system inspired by the great systems of the past and present. It is a fantasy computer, in that the main goal of the exercise is to imagine an alternate history of technology, but unlike other fantasy computers, such as the Pico 8, Lethe is built with the assumptions of modern hardware availability, and aspires to be a workstation, rather than a demo machine.

By releasing the Lethe design, I hope to inspire software engineers and architects by presenting a cohesive set of concepts with proven merit that have been overlooked by the current mainstream, due to momentum, technical debt, or lack of ambition. Not every component of Lethe as presented is equally plausible or appealing to all audiences, but by the end of your visit, you will hopefully agree that the ideas collected here, if implemented, would offer tangible benefits to heavy users.

Lethe isn't meant to be a totally baseless exercise in concept computing. I have the skills and drive to implement most of what's described here, and I am actually planning on building it all, though it may take the rest of my life to fulfill, and it's impossible to say how strongly the final product will resemble the original concept.

Inspirations and Influences

Numerous projects have been appropriated or referenced in the Lethe design.

On LISP futurism:

On escaping the POSIX yoke:

On graphical interface design:

On various forms of internet utopianism:

Themes and Naming

I have a strong fondness for dark fantasy, occultism, and the dungeoncore aesthetic. Many of the names in the OS are direct references to the Dark Elves of Warhammer Fantasy. (Games Workshop's lawyers might not like this, but they don't like anything, and it's not a genuine threat to their IP, so who cares?) Originally, the project was going to be called "Mirai," by analogy with Inferno, but since that name is already associated with a botnet and an anime, I decided to go with another one of the rivers of Hades, Lethe. Perhaps someday the entire underworld will be teeming with hobbyist OS projects.

In using these names, I've tried to avoid idiosyncratic jargon that would be opaque to English speakers—the text editor is called poet and its GUI is called Scribe, both programs that obviously have something to do with text. (Contrast the far more opaque names of vi, emacs, joe, pico, nano, Kate, Krita, etc. found in the POSIX world!) The shell is shar (a portmanteau of 'shell dhar,' and also an evil goddess in Forgotten Realms) and the debugger is flay (because clearly someone has to be punished for crashing). Admittedly, there are a few names that are fully idiosyncratic (Hekarti, the web server, is the Dark Elven goddess of black magic; Yutani is just wordplay on Wayland and Weyland–Yutani) but this opacity is placed on large, centrepiece server projects rather than everyday tools: Lethe's Applications drop the theme entirely and are just named based on their function, with the minimum necessary embellishment to distinguish them from competing programs on other platforms.