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

121–130 of 271 posts

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#121

Post by Tainnor »

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…

The "no files" part of mobile OSs is the worst part for me personally. I constantly re-download the same PDFs, have to look forever for "that particular picture", etc., because even though you can technically access the file system on Android it's not like the majority of apps supports a file manager interface, and many apps just dump their file somewhere without explicit structure, so I basically never find what I need.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#122

Post by coldtea »

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?

Well, the way of progress has always been simplying operations.

Do you know how to fix your car and do you make your own clothes, cheese and bread, in today's "bread and cheese eating", clothes wearing, car driving world?

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#123

Post by rtpg »

josteink wrote: post #115
rtpg wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Files are emphatically _not_ good first class primitives for rich sharing.

If you have a contacts program, are you going to make each contact a file? What about performance or bulk editing? From that program's perspective, the ideal is probably to have a single file (SQLite DB for example).

But now you don't have granular sharing mechanisms except through a clumsy export which requires you to give a name to the thing and put it somewhere and open it in the other program.

Meanwhile I hit the share sheet on my phone for the Contact. Some apps know about this form for data and can ingest it. Others fallback to text. It's the clipboard model, not the files model.

Files are _fine_, and it lets you do stuff like reverse engineer the format and do cool stuff. But it's clunky as hell when you have something relatively ephemeral.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#124

Post by rtpg »

Tainnor wrote: post #121
rtpg wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The "no files" part of mobile OSs is the worst part for me personally. I constantly re-download the same PDFs, have to look forever for "that particular picture", etc., because even though you can technically access the file system on Android it's not like the majority of apps supports a file manager interface, and many apps just dump their file somewhere without explicit structure, so I basically never find what I n…

Please note I didn't say "no files". I said "better clipboard". I like files as a thing to be exposed. But I think that for day-to-day work being able to move stuff around between apps without fidgeting around with files is very valuable.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#125

Post by swiley »

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…

I can open vim on my iphone/desktop and get a textbox. I don't see what storing things in files has to do with that.

>Extremely easy sharing of data between apps.

hah no. Try sharing large batches of files on iOS. with plenty of apps there's no way to do this (and often the only way to do it if you can is with the files app.)

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#126

Post by imtringued »

LuvSauce wrote: post #38
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what in god's name are you talking about? Photo management? Image editing? Video editing? DAWs? Games? The browser itself? Compilers... static analysis tools ... a myriad of other native developer tools ? I could go on, but what on earth is the "everything" that no longer matters? If you had said "everyone's gone to mobile", well, that's a claim. But "everyone's gone to saas and browsers" ... that's not even wrong.

Imagine a computer without internet. It's way less useful. Everything that matters is online now. Pottering wants to get rid of /home on Linux for example. You can even do all that stuff online by SSHing a much better computer.

>You can even do all that stuff online by SSHing a much better computer.

I pay 20€ per month to "SSH" into a worse computer and by "SSH" I mean I effectively do VNC over WebRTC. The video encoding performance of cloud servers is just abysmal. I'm forced to use 720p. Meanwhile my desktop can easily run 8 1080p VP8 streams at once without breaking a sweat. How much did it cost? 350€ for a Ryzen 2700 with 8 cores, 32 GB RAM and a new mainboard. I'm not counting the cost of the case or PSU because I already had those and there are super cheap options already. After 1.5 years (or 2 years if you include case, psu, storage) the server will have cost me more even though it performs far worse. Why would I still pay for the crappy server? Because it's a shared user experience. I'm not the only one on that server. My friends are there as well.

You know. If I actually used Stadia or Nvidia's alternative I'd be their worst customer. I'd run their dedicated GPU instances all day even if the only thing I do is listen to music with that instance while I'm playing games on my desktop.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#127

Post by swiley »

rtpg wrote: post #123
josteink wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Files are emphatically _not_ good first class primitives for rich sharing. If you have a contacts program, are you going to make each contact a file? What about performance or bulk editing? From that program's perspective, the ideal is probably to have a single file (SQLite DB for example). But now you don't have granular sharing mechanisms except through a clumsy export which requires you to give a name to the thing…

It turns out a group of experts has debated your example at length and come to some reasonable conclusions.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6350

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#128

Post by swiley »

saagarjha wrote: post #78
brnt wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want it to just work, stay away from those cutting edge distros stick to Linux' Windows: Ubuntu LTS. Its boring, but like Windows, that's precisely why it works out of the box.

Elementary OS is based on Ubuntu LTS.

In general if you see something super polished on Linux there's a decent chance it's broken. I think that's what GP was trying to say.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#129

Post by raziel2p »

II2II wrote: post #120
bobthepanda wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 eve…

I don't think your metaphors work. There's a huge difference between knowing how to sew a button or flipping a circuit breaker and being able to code.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#130

Post by swiley »

gerash wrote: post #118

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 an…

Personally I can't stand automatically positioned windows, the algorithm can't know about what particular thing I'm doing well enough to position things effectively.

What I wish the OSX window manager did was pointer style focus. Terminal emulates this for you but as soon as you have to use other apps (say multiple safari windows and a GUI editor for writing documentation) you loose this and need a second monitor.

Post reply on HN