Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 271 posts

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#111

Post by realusername »

rtpg wrote: post #99
wraptile wrote: post #65

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…

Here are some mobile concepts that I miss on OS: - not thinking about files: I can open Notes/Drafts on my phone and get a textbox. I kinda get this with Joplin, barely. - Real sandboxing, with a nice permission layer - Extremely easy sharing of data between apps. Of course files are theoretically a great sharing mechanism, but the sharing mechanism in mobile OS's are the logical conclusion of the clipboard - URIs th…

To each their own I guess, on my case I which phones would learn from desktop interfaces and let me manage files and apps properly.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#112

Post by Nextgrid »

bobthepanda wrote: post #105
wraptile wrote: post #65

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…

> 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? Why shouldn't everyone churn their own butter? Why shouldn't everyone sew their own clothes? Why shouldn't everyone build our own homes? Should we continue to dumb down feeding,…

> Why shouldn't everyone churn their own butter? Why shouldn't everyone sew their own clothes?

Selling pre-made butter or clothes doesn't prevent someone from making their own if the pre-made one doesn’t fit their needs.

In technology, making your own is often outright impossible due to proprietary APIs

In a lot of cases the inefficiency of the official implementation is a feature for the developer and they definitely do not want people to build more efficient clients (examples: no ads/irrelevant content, defaulting to chronological feed instead of algorithmic, etc) and use technical (and sometimes legal, like abusing copyright law) workarounds to make the process as difficult as possible.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#113

Post by m463 »

nly wrote: post #93

For many years it's seemed pretty obvious to me that most people don't have a need for a laptop for 'real work', but could instead just drop their phones in to a slick little dock connected to a keyboard, mouse and a large touch screen. I believe this was the original vision behind Ubuntu Phone before it was pared-down and made boring. Completely wireless pairing would be even better. It seems like the hardware is go…

Purism phone is designed for this. You can order the phone with a monitor (overpriced though)

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#114

Post by duckducky »

foobiekr wrote: post #67
duckducky wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use pulse audio volume control. See if it would help. Mine also broke after some system update. With this I was able to select bluetooth profile as well as set audio out via bluetooth. Before finding this bluetooth headset wouldnt work correctly on elementary os, but never needed it in linuxmint. apt install pavucontrol

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

Didn't miss the point at all. Why would you assume that? I faced a similar problem as parent and know the pain point. Was just trying to let parent know of a solution I found useful.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#115

Post by josteink »

rtpg wrote: post #99
wraptile wrote: post #65

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…

Here are some mobile concepts that I miss on OS: - not thinking about files: I can open Notes/Drafts on my phone and get a textbox. I kinda get this with Joplin, barely. - Real sandboxing, with a nice permission layer - Extremely easy sharing of data between apps. Of course files are theoretically a great sharing mechanism, but the sharing mechanism in mobile OS's are the logical conclusion of the clipboard - URIs th…

> not thinking about files

And I hate app-data not being files, not being portable. My data may be stuck inside a SaaS and only accessible through a closed-source app, and I have nothing to say about it.

> Real sandboxing, with a nice permission layer

Sandboxing apps is a good thing. Depending on your use-case, Snap/Flatpak or containers kinda solve this, but they are not the default way of running apps for now.

What mobile does wrong here though, is that it also sandboxes the user, not giving the user full access to his device, nor letting him let his apps get that access either.

This is user-hostile, on all current major mobile-platforms.

> Extremely easy sharing of data between apps

I would rephrase this as barely functional sharing, for only the limited subset of data the application has decided to implement sharing for, and only in ways the application-developers have considered inter-app sharing.

On a desktop, I as the user, have the power to decide how I want to share data and invent new ways data can be shared and utilized.

> URIs that go deep into other apps

While that is certainly a neat feature, it's an app-centric feature. How do you know which kind of apps I have installed? How do you know which of those apps within that niché I have installed?

And if you're not going to make it app-centric, you have to make it file/data-centric anyway... Which leaves us Android. Android does this better than iOS by having an intent-system which lets you register ability to handle both files, urls and subsets of those, and other apps can query for which apps supports which file/url-intents. So basically just a minor addition to the system we already have had on all desktop OSes for decades now.

And again: that's a system which already works really well when files are first-class concepts which everything else builds on.

So it's all back to files. If you want to empower the user, you must have files.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#116

Post by colechristensen »

wraptile wrote: post #65

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…

We continue to dumb down interfaces because of the assumption that people won’t learn and the reality that building a complex usable interface is hard and teaching is almost never done.

I remember when video games came with elaborate manuals, this discussion reminds me of that and how it stopped happening (and just now the smell of opening the box for a new game, i don’t think i’ll ever experience that again)

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#118

Post by gerash »

In my workflow all I need is a good window manager. The one on MacOS is not good even with extra apps (Rectangle). There is too much degree of freedom in moving a window pixel by pixel. I want it to automatically lay out the windows.

The other problem is a lot of things open are Chrome tabs nested within a Chrome window. I wish there were no tabs and the OS window manager would automatically surface the right tabs and windows and pick the right layout (eg. Four windows tiled or two windows side by side, etc.) With an easy keyboard search across the content of everything open

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#120

Post by II2II »

bobthepanda wrote: post #105
wraptile wrote: post #65

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…

> 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? Why shouldn't everyone churn their own butter? Why shouldn't everyone sew their own clothes? Why shouldn't everyone build our own homes? Should we continue to dumb down feeding,…

The problem is that we usually discuss things in extremes.

We don't need to know how to sew our own clothes, but knowing how to mend them is useful. Do we really want to live in a world where we toss out a shirt simply because a button falls off?

We don't need to know how to build a home, but knowing how to fix simple problems is useful. Do we really want to live in a world where we have to call in an electrician every time we trigger a circuit breaker?

We don't need to know how to churn butter, but knowing how to cook is useful. Do we really want to live in a world where we depend upon someone else decides what goes into every meal we eat?

Yes, computers are there to do stuff for us and to save time. We should be exploiting that. On the other hand, we should not be reliant upon it to the point where it interferes with control over our own destinies or the creative process.

Post reply on HN