Re-Thinking the Desktop OS • Hacker News Board

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#11

Post by mikewarot » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 2:06 AM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #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,…

I think that one of the primary reasons things have stalled is the fear we all carry around because we don't have any decent operating systems. With MS-DOS you could copy the OS disk, write protect it... load up any random piece of shareware and just try it out. There was zero chance it would toast anything, and you might find a gem.

We don't click on links that go to web sites we don't trust. We don't open email attachments, we're paranoid... because our operating systems weren't designed for the age of the internet.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#12

Post by Something1234 » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 2:11 AM UTC

ggm wrote: post #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 de…

Can you define what some of your acronyms mean? COW, DTRT, ORM. I think I know what an ORM (Object Relational Mapper) is, but not in the context you're using it.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#13

Post by adamnemecek » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 2:14 AM UTC

shmerl wrote: post #10

Linux/KDE are doing a good job, I've been using them as a daily desktop driver for years. For something more original there is Redox: https://www.redox-os.org

Redo doesn't do much original, it's a Unix.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#14

Post by xnx » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 2:14 AM UTC

x87678r wrote: 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.

If games can run via the cloud (e.g. Stadia), it should be possible for any app.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#15

Post by _where » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 2:19 AM UTC

mikewarot wrote: post #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.

Security is hardware level first, at multiple levels. So, I don’t think we’ll get it back, at least until eternal love beats evil.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#16

Post by Octoth0rpe » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 2:19 AM UTC

adamnemecek wrote: post #13

shmerl wrote: post #10

Linux/KDE are doing a good job, I've been using them as a daily desktop driver for years. For something more original there is Redox: https://www.redox-os.org

Redo doesn't do much original, it's a Unix.

tbf, in the context of _desktop_ innovation whether or not an OS is a unix or not is largely irrelevant today. That might've been a more relevant statement in the era when all desktop unixes used the same toolkit / CDE.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#17

Post by walrus01 » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 2:19 AM UTC

mikewarot wrote: post #11

walrus01 wrote: post #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,…

I think that one of the primary reasons things have stalled is the fear we all carry around because we don't have any decent operating systems. With MS-DOS you could copy the OS disk, write protect it... load up any random piece of shareware and just try it out. There was zero chance it would toast anything, and you might find a gem. We don't click on links that go to web sites we don't trust. We don't open email att…

some method to reliably run new stuff in a fully sandboxed environment (short of going through the time and effort to copy an entire disposable windows 10 home virtualbox machine), would definitely help with that problem.

linux based ideas like qubes are are a step in that direction.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#18

Post by easton » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 2:20 AM UTC

mikewarot wrote: post #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.

macOS is signing the system partition, making it effectively write protected in the next release. Not exactly the same, but people are still considering the idea.

https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=3xpv8r2m

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#19

Post by Scarbutt » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 2:22 AM UTC

x87678r wrote: 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.

There's Emacs and Vim.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#20

Post by firloop » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 2:27 AM UTC

I don’t want to re-invent the desktop. As a software engineer, I’m annoyed that I can’t do my entire job on my phone. I’d like to see dramatically better portable input interfaces.

I’d even be happy if more love was paid to “desktop light” environments. I have an iPad Pro that’s useless for software development without SSHing into a machine.