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If we talk technologically & not app availability, there's all kinds of things one might do with a better desktop. Academics & random people online stay dreamin

If we talk technologically & not app availability, there's all kinds of things one might do with a better desktop. Academics & random people online stay dreaming up better UI's or other capabilities. I'd like the internal control + self-modification of LISP machines, concurrency support of BeOS, capability-security of KeyKOS or CapDesk, maybe persistence of app data like KeyKOS, reincarnating drivers in user-mode like Minix3, modifiable-for-workload schedulers that prevent one task from taking down system like RTOS's, versioned filesystem like OpenVMS, two motherboards like SGI with clustering like VMS for mission-critical desktops, mini-version of NonStop for desktops for more mission critical, Amiga-style hardware offloading for key stuff like I/O, Burroughs-style CPU that made most code injection or type errors impossible, jumpers write-protecting the chip for my open-source firmware, ECC RAM, and a RAM disk w/ flash backup for main OS & apps to load crazy fast (or it always hibernates w/ hardware acceleration of that or persistance of changes). That's just a few off the top of my head. If it's a netbook for browsing, it might also use something like Illinois Browser Operating System (IBOS) as its base. Definitely throw in a NUMA chip on the high-performance version, too, so I can finally have me a modern SGI Onyx2 or Altix with 256+ CPU's, TB's of RAM, several GPU's, and a bunch of FPGA's. All hotswappable so my games, simulations, or recompiles of kernels aren't interrupted by mere hardware failures.

52-6F-62 10y ago
Definitely good points, and a few of them were admittedly way over my head in terms of applied knowledge. But it sounds like you're pointing to applied-need systems, like POS or IOT situations. I can see the usefulness there, completely. I guess I meant more in the mainstream realm, replacing readily what consumers would opt to use. I am going to have to read up on a number of the items you raised, thanks!
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  Good chunk of the list were in desktop or server roles. Good call on at least one or two being useful in embedded. Here's a UNIX alternatives list I made a while back that you might find interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10957020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10957020 Idea was whether there were better architectures.

52-6F-62 10y ago

Definitely good points, and a few of them were admittedly way over my head in terms of applied knowledge. But it sounds like you're pointing to applied-need systems, like POS or IOT situations. I can see the usefulness there, completely. I guess I meant more in the mainstream realm, replacing readily what consumers would opt to use. I am going to have to read up on a number of the items you raised, thanks!

nickpsecurity 10y ago
Good chunk of the list were in desktop or server roles. Good call on at least one or two being useful in embedded. Here's a UNIX alternatives list I made a while back that you might find interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10957020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10957020 Idea was whether there were better architectures.