You may or may not have wondered what it’s like to have an operating system that tries to manage all the crap we throw at our computers – but either way, here’s your chance to find out. you are os is a game by developer Pierre-Luc Brault, and it places you in a metaphor of a simple operating system. As the OS, your job is to manage the various processes and inputs that are competing for your attention, as well as manage your RAM and, ideally, keep your user from launching you across the room in frustration.
Thankfully, as a modern computer, your hardware has multiple CPU cores that you can assign processes to, and the gameplay loop involves shuffling processes in and out of the CPU allocation slot. Neglect a process for too long and his smiling face will slowly turn to indifference, sadness and despair; Continue to ignore this and your user will end the process entirely out of frustration. If this happens enough times, your user will get angry and quit and you’ll be in trouble; 10 requits and the user will simply give up and press “Reset”, at which point the game will be over.
No one will mistake this for “fun” – it’s like playing a crazy game at a fast pace, and it gets harder as the complexities increase. You will encounter processes that remain idle while waiting for user input, wasting CPU cycles in doing so; Priority processes that become redundant very quickly become redundant if they are not moved directly to the front of the queue for CPU time; And processes that take up RAM like little mini-LLMs. Oh, did we mention RAM management? Yes, you are also ready for this. If your RAM space fills up, you’ll have to swap pages from your computer’s hard drive, and you better believe it HeIt will slow things down.
after playing for a few minutes you are osMaybe you find yourself feeling bad, swearing at your computer running slowly all the time, even though you have the full Adobe suite running with Word, Excel, Steam and a perfectly reasonable 200-tab browser open. As a hypothetical example. Ahem.
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