81–90 of 271 posts
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.
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.
I probably misapplied ORM above. It wouldn't surprise me if somebody said "wrong acronym" Copy on Write (CoW) is how you avoid duplicating memory for code or data which doesn't change: when you do what unix does in fork()/exec() your initial state is: things which haven't been written are the same. So it is zero (kinda) extra cost. If you write to that bit of memory THEN it copies, so thats Copy, on Write. Then you have two, because one of them changed. So, If all electron backed apps means the 200+mb of electron crap is Copy-on-Write, its not 200 for mail, 200 for word, 200 for slack, its 200 for "all of them" until one of them writes to memory: it reduces the memory footprint.
DTRT is do the right thing.
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-win…
To quote a commonly-used Web meme: "Why not both?"
In my opinion, why should a software tool only have one interface to it? What if there were many possible interfaces available, from very simple interfaces with reasonable defaults for casual users, to more option-rich interfaces for power users, to an API for programmers. What if we could take advantage of today's AI technology to automatically construct GUIs that are tailored to a user's experience level? What if users could customize the GUIs in order to make the GUI fit their needs better?
What if the system supported a variety of languages, not only common languages such as Python that many programmers are familiar with, but also beginner-friendly languages? Users are willing to program provided it's not too difficult: AppleScript from the 1990s was a step in the right direction, and Excel's macro language is probably the most widely-used programming language in the world. With today's AI/NLP technology, we could go further by developing ways for users to describe repetitive, routine tasks using natural language.
I think there's still a lot of room for innovation on the desktop. But you highlight a very big problem: where is the market? Who is going to pay for this innovation? Outside of open-source projects, the major commercial desktop environments are platforms controlled by multi-billion dollar corporations. Building a new desktop environment that is capable of competing against the commercial giants will take a lot of time and capital. The last company to give this a try was Be, Inc. in the mid-1990s, and they had a hard time competing against Microsoft's OEM strategy. I wrote more about this at http://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2020/10/where-did-perso....
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-win…
It's very, very difficult to beat a keyboard. Tablets and even phones become day vs. night more usable if you plug in a keyboard, even ignoring everything else that still sucks about them.
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-win…
> Just try writing up a document on your phone! Just imagine what could be if they were on the level _desktops_? It's very, very difficult to beat a keyboard. Tablets and even phones become day vs. night more usable if you plug in a keyboard, even ignoring everything else that still sucks about them.
I find screen size to be a bigger advantage to desktop.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
To deploy using a 30GB partition it only takes about 5 minutes to write zeros to the 30GB, another 5 minutes to quickformat and deploy the WIM file to the fresh partition (in naturally well-defragmented condition), then a judicious BCDBOOT command to make it boot from your present BOOT or EFI folder.
Dynamicland is trying https://dynamicland.org/
Is there a paper about how their computing paradigm works? Basically the only thing I got from that page was, "damn, I'm glad I don't need to use gluesticks when I code."
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-win…
This is what I telling non technical friends for years now: as they spend more and more time with computers and the internet the investment to learn what is under the hood and to have more efficient interaction with better tools becomes worth it more and more. You can't say any more you don't fancy or care about IT when you spend hours each day on a computer.
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,…
Moreover, the desktop is a very difficult market to enter. Writing a new desktop environment that is competitive with even Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard is going to take a lot of work, even if they piggyback on existing operating systems such as Linux in order to avoid the full work of writing a new operating system. Moreover, where is there a viable business model for selling desktop operating systems? Be, Inc. tried with BeOS in the 1990s; the company had a hard time getting PC companies to agree to shipping their PCs with BeOS preinstalled due to agreements these companies had with Microsoft regarding preinstalling Windows. There's also the problem with software incompatibility, though, interestingly enough, this may be less of an issue today than it was in the 1990s due to the dominance of the Web and due to the "Electronization" of desktop applications.
My opinion is such innovation on the desktop will come from a hobbyist open-source project or from a small business that is willing to cater to a niche of users who want compelling alternatives to Microsoft, Apple, and various Linux desktops.