my #1 feature request to @apple and @microsoft and @linux -- start making SPEED a priority again. I hate all this slow software.
Re-Thinking the Desktop OS
171–180 of 271 posts
Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS
#172Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS
#173Honestly I think a lot of ideas about where to go with Desktop OSs these days are just complexity fetishist slashfiction. I don't think we need new complicated paradigms, instead we should take a look at our history of what worked and what didn't and build based a simple combination of good ideas we already have. My opinion, short version, hastily written, and incomplete: 1) Applications are self-contained objects th…
All of these points sound like macos apart from 4, possibly 6 and definitely 7. Your home directory is your profile/account (what's the difference on a single computer?).
Although 7 is effectively Rosetta / Rosetta 2.
Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS
#174Honestly I think a lot of ideas about where to go with Desktop OSs these days are just complexity fetishist slashfiction. I don't think we need new complicated paradigms, instead we should take a look at our history of what worked and what didn't and build based a simple combination of good ideas we already have. My opinion, short version, hastily written, and incomplete: 1) Applications are self-contained objects th…
All of these points sound like macos apart from 4, possibly 6 and definitely 7. Your home directory is your profile/account (what's the difference on a single computer?).
> All of these points sound like macos apart from 4, possibly 6 and definitely 7.
MacOS has some good ideas. 1 and 2 actually apply to a lot of OSs from the 90s. Good luck finding a spacial file manager today though.
> Your home directory is your profile/account (what's the difference on a single computer?).
The difference is that there is no OS concept of an "account". Right now, you can't take your home directory between systems and have it just work because the OS needs you to have a user account. If your user ID on the new system is different from the old one then your file permissions will be broken.
The idea is, that the OS doesn't really care about protecting the machine from the user in a personal computing scenario. It does, however, care about protecting the system and the user's data from malicious applications, so that's where the permissions should be.
Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS
#175Wow, 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…
I think that we should have a third DE with the same level of UX for configuration and simple customization as Gnome and KDE. But focused in Tiling WM. Pick something like Awesome or Sway and creating the whole ecosystem. Pick a OS that suits it like Manjaro (look to the logo, its tiling wm for sure!) and offers the DE as an initial option in the installation.
But considering the "natural selection" that happens here, it may be the way that is because only technical people care about this kind of thing… Idk…
Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS
#176Sometimes when there's a discussion on alternative operating systems, people bring up Urbit. Urbit advertises itself as an OS with simple foundation: Nock VM. Here's the entire specification for Nock: https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/master/doc/spec/nock/5.t... You may notice that there's barely any English in this specification, or even examples. But that's not the main problem. The main problem for me is that th…
Another critical work here: https://github.com/tibru/tibru
Tibru is Urbit spelled backwards.
But these are implementation concerns. How about the user experience: is there any substance there to learn from or improve?
Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS
#177Honestly I think a lot of ideas about where to go with Desktop OSs these days are just complexity fetishist slashfiction. I don't think we need new complicated paradigms, instead we should take a look at our history of what worked and what didn't and build based a simple combination of good ideas we already have. My opinion, short version, hastily written, and incomplete: 1) Applications are self-contained objects th…
> modern Mac application bundles
I just want to say that OLD Mac applications were exactly that, too -- even the OS was basically just "Finder" and "System", that was it. Dragging those two files to a different floppy (and swapping them 12 times to complete the copy) gave you a bootable disk. Meanwhile Windows apps were hundreds of files ... then eventually Mac apps went the same way, although not as wildly.
Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS
#178My 2 cents from running Linux for 13 years (on / off, mostly on) and windowz / macOS. Full disclosure, I run Xfce / Xubuntu now with ZERO modifications.
I have to agree with @wraptile and say that we don't need a desktop revolution. In the open source / *nix world, there is a desktop for EVERYONE. Gnome is the corporate DE, then you have folks who run Firefox and everything else in a terminal. I think the desktop is akin to a car. Things have obviously changed, but the base will _always_ be there. Cars have 4 wheels, a steering wheel, and cockpit tools. Desktops need to open applications, field graphics, and navigate you through your computing tasks. And those are different for everyone. Someone driving their kids to school has different needs than a forktruck driver in a factory.
One thing that always interests me (I don't work in "tech") is that everyone is always trying to make things "new" or "revolutionize" it. I think the DE world is fine. We have the 2000 Toyota Tacoma (Xfce), The Teslas (macOS), and the Honda Civic (windowz). I'm not sure revolutions are needed. Tweaks and changes here and there to make things more stable or better tech (akin from x11 to wayland) but large overalls have already been tested and came and went.
Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I didn't necessarily mean "learn to code" in such explicit manner with my original comment. More like learn technology itself and some strong basics of how everything works so people would be more equipped to grok this new world we're living in. To get a driver's license you need some basic knowledge of car internals. I'd argue that computers are infinitely more important in our society than a car yet majority of peo…
I'm a software engineer and even I struggle to understand how some of the applications I use work. This month I had to figure out why my laptop's monitor brightness keys randomly stop doing anything and it led into a rabbit hole of systemd, udev, ACPI, the intel xorg driver and other unpleasant things. Next month I might run into a sound issue and I'll have to dig deep into completely different areas like pulseaudio and ALSA. And all this knowledge won't do me any good on Windows or MacOS.
The car is a relatively simple machine compared to a desktop computer, and unlike computers, most basic knowledge apply to all cars regardless of brand and model. Our computers are patched together with gaffa tape, they're not some timeless universal design the way the clutch in a car is.
In fact, in a way I become worse at using them because I know more about them - think about "just turn it off and on again" vs wanting to debug it and understand the root cause of whatever issue I'm having.
Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of these points sound like macos apart from 4, possibly 6 and definitely 7. Your home directory is your profile/account (what's the difference on a single computer?).
> All of these points sound like macos apart from 4, possibly 6 and definitely 7. MacOS has some good ideas. 1 and 2 actually apply to a lot of OSs from the 90s. Good luck finding a spacial file manager today though. > Your home directory is your profile/account (what's the difference on a single computer?). The difference is that there is no OS concept of an "account". Right now, you can't take your home directory b…
Thanks for the explanations. I realise that the spatial file manager is missing these days, but I prefer the navigation file manager. Whenever I use BeOS I find the plethora of open windows for each directory unnavigable.
You can get Finder to open each item in a new window and hide the sidebar to make it spatial-like, although I am not sure if there is a method of making "open in new window" the default.
I think the separation of account and profile is a difficult concept, unless the directory had a specific UUID associated intrinsically with it so that permissions could be applied to objects that didn't know about "users"?