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Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

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Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#2
a few years ago everything that mattered was on the local machine (apps + files) and there was some interoperability among apps (+ standards around files)

now most of what matters is siloed in saas tools and we access those through browsers or siloed browsers

time to re-design

https://twitter.com/__tosh/status/1316534733719908352

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#3
Everything for my PC is one of:

1) Web based (something lightweight like ChromeOS can do it)

2) Command line (easy to ssh into a remote box)

3) IDE (heavy)

I only need a light weight terminal for 1&2 but 3 keeps tripping me up. Would be great if IntelliJ ran with remote back end.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#4
If you can show me the invested COW cost of electron is low enough I can live in electron apps.

If Microsoft re-works W10+ to be a thin shim over the kernel and Office works on Linux clean-port, not webapp, I'll be fine too.

Mostly what people want is the plan9 plumber: the ability to point and select things, and have s/w contextually work out how to DTRT with it. This is ORM. Corba. whatever.

Patents suck. If you depend on patented methods to make fonting hints work, you are evil.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#5
Personal opinion I think a lot of opportunities for innovation and growth in the desktop OS market have stagnated, as increasingly 90% of what people do is contained within a browser window and performed through some sort of network-dependent cloud service/saas/web app. Inside chrome, edge, firefox, safari, whatever.

For many non technical consumer users it no longer really matters whether they're running Windows 10, MacOS or something weird like a linux+xorg/KDE desktop environment.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#6
post #3

Everything for my PC is one of: 1) Web based (something lightweight like ChromeOS can do it) 2) Command line (easy to ssh into a remote box) 3) IDE (heavy) I only need a light weight terminal for 1&2 but 3 keeps tripping me up. Would be great if IntelliJ ran with remote back end.

I know it's not IntelliJ, and there are still some warts to it, but VSCode's remote capabilities have been good enough for me to use full time for python development.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#7
post #3

Everything for my PC is one of: 1) Web based (something lightweight like ChromeOS can do it) 2) Command line (easy to ssh into a remote box) 3) IDE (heavy) I only need a light weight terminal for 1&2 but 3 keeps tripping me up. Would be great if IntelliJ ran with remote back end.

Amazon Cloud9 [1] and GitHub CodeSpaces [2] already offer cloud IDE. There are almost certainly many more.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/cloud9/ [2] https://github.com/features/codespaces

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#8
I want old pre-AppStore OSX/macOS that doesn’t nanny my installs or screw old drivers, with a good package manager, and easily tabbed and gridded terminal windows without tmux necessarily.

I’d also like GPL’d Windows XP running flawlessly like a mac.

I’d use Linux on the desktop, but I’ve never liked any of the desktop managers and it was never as reliable as OSX/macOS.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#9
I'm looking forward to the day Genode brings capability based security to the desktop. We can actually have computers that don't turn traitor at the first string buffer overflow.

I want computing as secure as when we had MS-DOS and floppy disks. You knew what disk (and therefor what data) you were risking at any given time. You could write protect the OS.

We can have it back... it's a matter of time now.

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