Components

Caveats

Most if not all pages are just rough notes, and these pages as a whole are far from complete. More notes will be added in time, eventually, maybe.

If, from reading these notes, you conclude that I am off my rocker, you won’t be the first, and you may even be right. These pages may simply position me as an acolyte to the late Gene Ray.

No doubt there are a dozen and one reasons why none of this would ever work, but perhaps somewhere deep down there is a tiny fragment that could be used for something.

Session Manager: Responsible for creating and closing user logon sessions and granting permissions to user processes on demand.
Desktop Manager: Responsible for launching all the desktop environment processes within new logon sessions and despatching desktop-level events to the relevant processes according to the configured bindings. Local to each user’s desktop session. The Desktop Manager is also the target of requests to launch files, URLs and applications.
Window Manager: An abstract facility with interchangeable concrete implementations. Responsible for displaying the user’s windows. Draws window borders and title bars and handles windowing tasks such as move, resize, maximise and restore, minimise, zoom (size to fit), collapse and expand, tile, cascade, dock, iconise and move to back according to its behavioural model. Issues change events to all registered listeners and accepts change commands from registered processes (e.g. taskbar, dock, application menu). Third-party window managers will each provide a separate model, allowing a variety of behavioural choices such as RISC OS, classic Mac OS (where each application has a dedicated layer containing its windows) and AmigaOS as well as models such as a tiling window manager. Ideal behaviour is achieved in conjunction with a compatible theme. Caveat: see the desktop environment page for concerns about the viability of this idea.
Log Manager: Responsible for storing and retrieving both system and application log entries.
Configuration Manager: This service hosts Layer Config.
Cache Manager: This service manages in-RAM and on-disk caching for the operating system and application software.