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Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

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Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#141

Post by richardjdare »

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,…

I think the idea that programming is a back-room industrial or maintenance operation performed by specialists misses the point that programming is also another way to use your computer. The most fluid and limitless way, in fact.

Programming is not just like being a car mechanic or factory floor engineer, its like being an expert driver at the same time.

When I use my desktop, it often occurs to me that I could write something to speed up a task, if only the application was accessible in a similar way to Emacs, or had Amiga-style ARexx ports that I could talk to in a script. From this perspective, programming is the most fine-grained GUI affordance within a computer system. By making it accessible along a continuum with simpler GUI tools, we greatly increase the ability of the user to do magic, or to learn to do it.

I would really like to see the development of an ergonomic expert-oriented desktop that lets me use my programming skills in a high-level and bureaucracy-free manner, to augment my use of an attractive and well-integrated GUI. There's no reason why such features should impinge on ordinary non-programmer use.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#142

Post by mrmonkeyman »

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,…

Wrong metaphors. That is like saying everybody needs to write a compiler or bootloader.

That's not necessary, but everybody ought to be able to think logically and express it in a universal form whether you call it programming or doing basic excel work. In the world I want to live in at least. If you want to live in an arbitrary, religious, backwards madhouse for eternity be my guest. There's only one path forward and many paths back.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#143

Post by spurgu »

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…

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.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#144

Post by pxtail »

teekert wrote: post #119

I always get "This content is not available to you", then after a reload it does work. I'm on Firefox btw.

When someone is trying to have meaningful discussion or suggest something important and does it all on twitter for me for some reason it automatically devalues whole effort and communicates that it's just some unimportant random musings. I'm not perceiving twitter as a place for other things than generating outrage, virtue signaling, lighthearted memes and fun or top-down style notices/messages.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#145

Post by sanitycheck »

LuvSauce wrote: post #33
_where wrote: post #8

I want old pre-AppStore OSX/macOS that doesn’t nanny my installs or screw old drivers, with a good package manager, and easily tabbed and gridded terminal windows without tmux necessarily. I’d also like GPL’d Windows XP running flawlessly like a mac. I’d use Linux on the desktop, but I’ve never liked any of the desktop managers and it was never as reliable as OSX/macOS.

Would you mind using Linux? It's been my experience that it's done everything I wanted it to well. Linux on desktop has changed. I hated it too in the 2000s. Now mostly everything just works, KDE can look and feel like any desktop including OSX. Very reliable. You'll find a pirated version of XP running as you wish soon since the leak of the XP source code not GPL though.

I almost just spat out my tea.

I've tried to move to Linux once a year since 2005. A few weekends ago I did my annual attempt and had a go at Elementary OS (live USB wouldn't boot, gave up), MX Linux (couldn't get sound, wouldn't boot after installing nvidia drivers), Manjaro XFCE (kept locking up, requiring a power cycle) and Pop OS.

Pop fared best, but even then I had all kinds of showstopper problems with monitor power saving, resolution, crazy window repositioning, and some behaviour where the desktop workspace randomly becomes far larger than the monitor and sort of pans around. If I leave my computer for 10 mins then have to spend 20 mins fixing it when I come back, that is a deal breaker.

I persevered though... Tried playing a game, alt-tabbed out to do something else, machine rebooted. Tried to use their tiling window manager functionality, but it had all kinds of weird bugs making it virtually impossible to use for anything except simply switching focus (and even then, their theme does not visually distinguish between focused and unfocused windows, which is problematic!)

Anyway... rant over. Short version: I disagree with you. :)

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#146

Post by cookiengineer »

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…

I kind of wrote this comment but got afraid to get caught up in the desktop UI circlejerk. Now I wrote it again...

My hope for the "modern desktop" is actually having a hybrid system that offers UX automation for the most used tasks, but allows efficient interaction when users are power users of it.

With things happening lately around purism's phosh shell, and pinephone being on the verge of having a full convergence desktop...I think we are finally getting very close to actually implementing it.

What the ecosystem around phosh now needs is apps, apps that can replace that proprietary shit that is forced upon users. Libhandy was/is a huge step forward to have a responsive AND adaptive layouting in native apps.

I don't know whether we actually can use GTK here, or whether it turns out that HTML/CSS like concepts are the way to go then, because it's a transferable concept across multiple platforms (and data endpoints, like print or braille stylesheets) but I really hope that it gets easier to write offline ready apps in the future for both mobile and desktop without having to go the react native BS route that always turns out to duplicate codebases anyways.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#147

Post by flohofwoe »

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,…

While the parent is a bit extreme in his views that "everyone should know how to code" (which is rubbish to be honest, everyone should know how to go about general problem-solving, but not how to code), the underlying problem is a different one and has nothing to do with "gate-keeping", instead that "one-size-fits-all" doesn't work.

For some reason, UIs are now designed towards an "average user", but as the airforce has found out long ago: average users don't exist in the real-world [1], it's an entirely made up concept.

The solution to this is customizability. Create an OS that's easy to use in the default configuration but let me tweak it to my own needs just like I can adjust the seat in my car.

[1] https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#148

Post by jcelerier »

OkGoDoIt wrote: post #40
xnx wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If games can run via the cloud (e.g. Stadia), it should be possible for any app.

Microsoft remote desktop seems to work pretty well over cellular on my iPad

one person's "seems to work pretty well" is another's "how can you manage to stay sane like that"

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#149

Post by pjmlp »

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…

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,

"Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4

Including the part of being written on a memory safe systems programming language.

Re: Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

#150

Post by ptidhomme »

mastazi wrote: post #100
ptidhomme wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to write faster with my index finger + swype than with a keyboard (now I have an old iPhone) I find screen size to be a bigger advantage to desktop.

If your typing speed on a keyboard is comparable to your typing speed on a phone, it sounds like you might have a lot to gain from learning touch typing, look it up. I was in your same situation not long ago

Thanks for the info, didn't know it was a thing.

Mind that I mention it was specifically index finger swiping. Maybe it wasn't actually faster than physical keyboard, but it was certainly an order of magnitude faster than discrete thumbs phone typing.

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