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Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

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Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#251

Post by ywei3410 »

vikramkr wrote: post #228
TeMPOraL wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a strong point. Personally, I find it both hard to argue against and at the same time extremely dehumanizing . Related to this is the phenomenon of turning everything into service. Why would you own things and accept responsibility for maintaining them, if you could just throw money at the service provider and have the thing be present when it's needed? Of course the thing will be extremely limited in what you c…

No the ideal end game is that we specialize into whatever role we want with full autonomy without having to worry about things we don't want to worry about. I dont want to have to know how to build a house or do construction work. Once upon a time, I would have had to know how to make a shelter. Now, because that's become a service, I can focus my energy on things I enjoy. But if I wanted to, I could focus my energy…

Correction: You _have_ to specialize in the fields that you are good at; not what you want to be good at because you can't compete in the other fields.

A couple of million years without advancing is hyperbole to the extreme; specialization which you are touting has only existed for 100-150 years or so (see Foucault, Frankfurt school etc...).

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#252

Post by bobthepanda »

Spivak wrote: post #234
Vrondi wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing to see someone celebrating helplessness for the masses.

I don't think this is a resolvable conflict in general; one person's division of labor is someone else's helplessness. I think it's crazy that some people don't cook. Like every house and apartment comes with a kitchen, what do you mean you don't use it? "It's so much cheaper" I say ignoring the fact that I'm a cooking and baking enthusiast and so I'm not counting the fact that if I valued my time at any reasonable r…

> Like every house and apartment comes with a kitchen, what do you mean you don't use it?

Traditionally in urban areas most people actually purchased food instead of making it, because most people did not have kitchens.

You can kind of still see that today; many old New York tenements have been converted into apartments with "kitchens", but really this usually describes something about the size of an airplane bathroom with a stove, a fridge and 1 counter.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#253

Post by pjmlp »

Koshkin wrote: post #250
pjmlp wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good that you mention Engelbart, because none of the mainstream desktop OSes are close to his ideas, or what the Xerox workstations allowed for, ironically Windows is probably the one most closest to it. While GNU/Linux have the necessary tooling for making it as well, but thanks to the fragmentation and some communities hatred against GNOME/KDE, it will never happen. This is what a modern desktop OS should look like…

> what a modern desktop OS should look like I take this as a joke. There is nothing modern-looking about it. Geeky, yes. Not designed for touch interface. Resembles Oberon, which I would not call modern, either. Maybe, we are not ready for it yet. Belongs in the future, then. (Or, more likely, in the past.)

Then the joke is on you by failing to understand the OS concepts that are exposed there.

To proper understand a book one has to read more than just the back cover overview.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#254

Post by spurgu »

Spivak wrote: post #236
anonymou2 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then when that job is no longer needed by society you are really, really lost.

I mean that's already true. The kinds of skills that people talk about in these threads are typically very domestic. Even if you had all of them you still probably have a few skills that can bring in money if you're lucky.

> I mean that's already true.

Exactly. That's why it makes a lot of sense to study/learn things outside your area of expertise, and/or if you want to lean on the more extreme side, study/learn basic survival skills (that everyone used to know before the agricultural revolution).

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#255

Post by spurgu »

Vrondi wrote: post #232
spurgu wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not extremes. Modern society is designed so that we don't have to do any of those things (in extreme or even in between), we just throw money (that we generated doing one specific job) at our problems.

Amazing to see someone celebrating helplessness for the masses.

Not sure if you're directing this comment at me, but I'm surely not celebrating it, merely observing it as a fact.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#256

Post by pjmlp »

zepto wrote: post #220
pjmlp wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good that you mention Engelbart, because none of the mainstream desktop OSes are close to his ideas, or what the Xerox workstations allowed for, ironically Windows is probably the one most closest to it. While GNU/Linux have the necessary tooling for making it as well, but thanks to the fragmentation and some communities hatred against GNOME/KDE, it will never happen. This is what a modern desktop OS should look like…

Can you say more about why Windows is closest? I’m not looking to debate - just that it’s not obvious and I suspect the specific reasons why would be interesting to know about. Thanks!

Sure, first a short overview of how those OSes used to work and how one can map those ideas into Windows.

Mesa/Cedar also shares some ideas with the other workstation variants from Xerox PARC, namely Interlisp-D and Smalltalk, just based on a strong typed language for systems programming, with reference counting and a cycle collector.

The language itself compiles to bytecode, because Xerox PARC machines used bytecode with microcoded CPUs, whose interpreter was loaded on boot. So in a sense it was still native somehow.

The full OS was written in Mesa/Cedar, and everything was kind of exposed to the developers.

The shell is more like a REPL, where you can access all that functionality, meaning the public functions/procedures from dynamically loaded modules, interact with text selection from any application window, or execute actions on a selected window. And as REPL, it worked on structured data.

Basically similar to what Powershell offers, with its structured data, and ability to call any COM/UWP, .NE or plain DLLs libraries.

Then you could embedded objects into other objects and this the basis of the compound document architecture, basically the genesis for OLE in Windows and COM (COM is just the basic features which OLE is built upon, although more the OLE 2.0, the 1.0 was more complicated still).

The way Office works between applications and its inline editing of OLE documents can be found in Xerox PARC workstations, as Charles Simonyi brought Bravo ideas into Word, as one of Bravo creators.

Since Windows Vista, most new APIs are actually a mix of .NET and COM (now UWP), which expose a similar high level set of OS API (bare bones Win32 has hardly changed since XP days).

Now, many of these concepts can also be found in GNOME and KDE, however due to the way distributions get put together, it is hard to really provide such integrated developer experience across the whole stack.

And while REPL like shells do exist for UNIX clones, their adoption is a tiny blip when compared against traditional UNIX shells.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#257

Post by faisalhackshah »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #31
firloop wrote: post #20

I don’t want to re-invent the desktop. As a software engineer, I’m annoyed that I can’t do my entire job on my phone. I’d like to see dramatically better portable input interfaces. I’d even be happy if more love was paid to “desktop light” environments. I have an iPad Pro that’s useless for software development without SSHing into a machine.

> I have an iPad Pro that’s useless for software development without SSHing into a machine. And even that is a horrible experience because the iPad keyboard doesn’t allow key repeat, making vim a terrible experience. That used to be an issue anyway. Maybe they’ve fixed it.

> And even that is a horrible experience because the iPad keyboard doesn’t allow key repeat, making vim a terrible experience. That used to be an issue anyway. Maybe they’ve fixed it.

Isn't Vim the editor with the least reliance upon key repeat? Hardcore Vimmers would argue if you are using key repeat, you're doing it wrong.

What do you use key repeat for in Vim?

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#258

Post by vikramkr »

ywei3410 wrote: post #251
vikramkr wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No the ideal end game is that we specialize into whatever role we want with full autonomy without having to worry about things we don't want to worry about. I dont want to have to know how to build a house or do construction work. Once upon a time, I would have had to know how to make a shelter. Now, because that's become a service, I can focus my energy on things I enjoy. But if I wanted to, I could focus my energy…

Correction: You _have_ to specialize in the fields that you are good at; not what you want to be good at because you can't compete in the other fields. A couple of million years without advancing is hyperbole to the extreme; specialization which you are touting has only existed for 100-150 years or so (see Foucault, Frankfurt school etc...).

Specialization and division of labor is literally a defining aspect of civilization. Did you forget a couple zeros? The industrial revolution alone was starting around 1760, which is 260 years ago, and evidence for the existence of civilization extends quite a bit further back than that...

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#259

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

waddlesplash wrote: post #237
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, at least half of the things that make Haiku awesome are buried deep inside its kernel rather than being anything directly to do with the desktop. Also, the contrast between Haiku and Linux in my mind just points to the more fundamental difference between a design that says "you will do things this way, because this is better" (Haiku) and one that says "we'll give you a dozen ways to approach every problem…

(Haiku developer here.) Ultimately a lot of the things Haiku "dictates" are at levels that 99.9% of people, including developers, do not care about: the window manager and display server, launch interface, package manager, etc. Certainly those decisions have consequences, but ultimately (for example) do you really need the freedom to decide whether you want ALSA or OSS? People just want audio to work, and programmers…

You don't have the freedom to choose OSS in terms of implementation, and haven't for more than a decade.

You do have the freedom to choose OSS the API. Some programmers even think that it's a better API (they're wrong, but what can you do?).

I wasn't thinking at all about user-visible things that Haiku "dictates", but internal design patterns. Most of them are great, and most of them exist on Linux too (but alongside a bunch of alternatives, hence the "problems", such as they are).

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#260

Post by AshWolfy »

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,…

When we loose important features and usability for simplicity
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