Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

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I e recently arrived at the conclusion that we need semantic interfaces (think semantic web). Where things are naturally cross referential and indexing is useful beyond clever search hacks. With so much of our day to day lives being digital it would be UI 2.0 to finally break this barrier. It struck me like a brick wall how I released that my interactions with the “machine” are incredibly isolated from one another and despite advances in Machine learning it still doesn’t build a great predictive index locally that I can leverage for finding or surfacing my own precious content or natural suggestions for whom I may want to share a certain piece of knowledge with and that’s just a small example I can think of quickly

Some of the tech mentioned in this Twitter thread is pretty neat too. Maybe I should take a second look at Pharo

It’s my dream to work in some kind of next level browser/app that would leverage this kind of thinking. One day I hope

Wow, I'm masively disappointed with this thread.

We have so many different Desktop "OS's" already. There's hardly a need for a _revolution_; strong stability and support is needed but there's just no paying market for it by the looks of it.

4 biggest desktop environments are by mega corporations (apple, microsoft) and by big open-source collectives (Gnome, KDE). But is that it? No, there's also a bunch of tilling-window managers with their own desktop philosophies, there are entire terminal drawing frameworks with full GUI support.

Desktop is awesome. If anything mobile is the one needing to catch up. iOS and Android are awful, awful environments outside of casual usage. Just try writing up a document on your phone! Just imagine what could be if they were on the level _desktops_?

Real question: Do we continue to dumb down software to exclusive casual usage for house-moms or we try to move our society to be more techn savy as we are clearly moving to a more tech relying world. Why shouldn't everyone know how to code?

To paraprashe Mr. Engelbart: it's a failed tool if you use it exactly the same way the day you bought it and a year after.

you're missing his point. the issue is not the specific issue but the endless litany of issues.

Back in the early 2000s I had the idea for a desktop OS where the local apps were all just http servers, and every OS “window” just a “browser”.

My original idea involved a custom markup ui language akin to WPF because at the time HTML was not nearly as up to the task. HTML could probably handle it today.

Between Electron, WebOS and ChromeOS some of the ideas have been tried but not to as high of a degree.