8 ms·

I'm the original author. I hadn't planned to publicize this yet. There are still some incomplete parts, broken links, and missing screenshots. But the Internet

I'm the original author. I hadn't planned to publicize this yet. There are still some incomplete parts, broken links, and missing screenshots. But the Internet wants what it wants. Just to clarify a few things. I just joined Mozilla Devrel. None of this article has anything to do with Mozilla. I know that none of the ideas in this article are new. I am a UX expert and have 25 years experience writing professional software. I personally used BeOS, Oberon, Plan 9, Amiga, and many others. I read research papers for fun. My whole point is that all of this has been done before, but not integrated into a nice coherent whole. I know that a modern Linux can do most of these things with Wayland, custom window managers, DBus, search indexes, hard links, etc. My point is that the technology isn't that hard. What we need is to put all of these things into a nice coherent whole. I know that creating a new mainstream desktop operating system is hopeless. I don't seriously propose doing this. However, I do think creating a working prototype on a single set of hardware (RPi3?) would be very useful. It would give us fertile playground to experiment with ideas that could be ported to mainstream OSes. And thank you to the nearly 50 people who have signed up to the discussion list. What I most wanted out of this article was to find like minded people to discuss ideas with. Thanks, Josh

jlundberg 9y ago
Thanks Josh for publishing your naive article early. Reading it and a bunch of the comments was the best read this week. History has yet to concide open desktop operating systems in favour for smartphone era silo platforms.
- joshmarinacci 9y ago
  I feel the answer, at least for desktop, is going to be some sort of hybrid between the app store model of smartphones and the upstream packager model of Linux distros. What I'd really like to see is some data viz and machine learning tools to analyze the dependencies of open source software, and then intelligently cut extra strings. Fewer deps makes more reliable software.
bitmapbrother 9y ago
You've probably heard of Google's new OS Fuchsia. What are your thoughts of the technology decisions they've made so far?
- joshmarinacci 9y ago
  They haven't talked about it much, but the idea of no initial permissions is a good one. Today the OS must fundamentally not trust any application. Permissions at install time are a good idea. Permissions at use time is an even better idea. Provenance also helps. But nothing beats sandboxing the app as much as possible. There's no silver bullets here, but we might be able to silver plate a few.
  - Gaelan 9y ago
    > Today the OS must fundamentally not trust any application. I entirely agree. > Permissions at install time are a good idea. I'm actually not so sure about this. I think the "iOS model" of asking for permissions when necessary is much better than the "Android model"* of a big list of permissions on install, preventing use of the app if any of them aren't granted (leading to users giving apps less scrutiny over their permissions than than they would under the iOS model). * I believe some recent versions of Android (M?) may support the "iOS model" in some form.
    - teolandon 9y ago
      Recent Android versions have a pretty good system in place. The apps still work even without some permissions (for example Instagram can work for browsing, but won't be able to take any pictures without the camera permission), and you can easily review the permissions you have granted to any app, and revoke them after the fact. Now, the real problem is that permissions are too general. The "access/read/write files" permission is all grouped up in one place, so you end up with tons of directory for every app in your root directory (that don't get deleted when uninstalling the apps that generated them), and you allow unnecessary access to other files as well. Or the network permission, which could lead to all sorts of traffic, while many developers just need it for ads.
joshmarinacci 9y ago
Correction, 110+ people have signed up now. Wow!
- unicornporn 9y ago
  If you want even more people to sign up, you may want to edit your post to include the URL to the list[1] in your original post. It took me quite some time to find it as you called it a discussion list here on HN and a “group” on your blog post. [1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/idealos-design https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/idealos-design
vacri 9y ago
> My point is that the technology isn't that hard. I disagree - the technology is extremely hard. You're talking centuries of staff-hours to make your OS, if you want it to be a robust general-purpose OS and not a toy. Just the bit where you say you want the computer to scan what's in your hands and identify it? That in itself is extraordinarily difficult. You mischaracterise the task at hand by pretending it's simple.
- edraferi 9y ago
  I think the article gave that as an example of what the system should enable, rather than a prerequisite for launch. The system wide message bus and semantic shortcuts features should make it really easy for developers of advanced peripherals to plug into the system. For example, a Kinect would be a lot more useful in ideal OS. You could bind gestures to window manager commands, for example.
  - chaboud 9y ago
    Unfortunately, it's wholly impractical to do real work with message busses alone if you want to maximize performance. See: Every performance inter-process system ever... Could we cover a number of cases with copy-on-write semantics and system transactional memory? Sure, but the tech isn't broadly available yet, and it wouldn't cover everything. Sometimes you just need to share a memory mapping and atomically flip a pointer...
    - joshmarinacci 9y ago
      It doesn't have to be implemented as a message bus. It should just be a message bus semantically. Under the hood we could implement all sorts of tricks to make it faster, as long as the applications don't notice the difference.
      - chaboud 9y ago
        I would expect that to work to a point, but coherence and interlocking are eventually going to rear their ugly heads. I've created and lived with multiple inter-process high-performance multimedia/data systems (e.g. video special effects and editing, real-time audio processing, bioinformatics), and I've yet to encounter a message passing semantic that could match the performance of manually managed systems for the broad range of non-pathological use-cases, not to speak of the broader range of theoretically possible use-cases. If something's out there, I'd love to see it. So far as I know, nobody has cracked that nut yet.
jitix 9y ago
Thanks for writing this! I have especially been waiting for the next release of some OS to have something revolutionary for people who use the computers as workstations.. but at this point most updates seem to be about voice automation, accessibility, sync and other "mobile" features.. I have wanted a DBFS for a long time for both personal and work files, and my huge multimedia collection.. secondly the ability to pipe data from one GUI app to another will help us immensely.. its the main reason I feel more productive while using CLI.
bane 9y ago
Thanks for writing this. I think many of your observations are correct (and agree with them). I'm not as sold on your solutions though. Here's some thoughts: Abstractions are a correct way to do things when we don't know what "correct" is or need to deal with lots of unknowns in a general way. And then when you need to aggregate lots of different abstractions together, it's often easier to sit yet another abstraction on top of that. However, in many cases we have enough experience to know what we really need. There's no shame in capturing this knowledge and then "specializing" again to optimize things. In the grand 'ol days, this also meant that the hardware was a true partner of the software rather than an IP restricted piece of black magic sealed behind 20 layers of firewalled software. (At first this wasn't entirely true, some vendors like Atari were almost allergic to letting developers know what was going on, but the trend reversed for a while). Did you want to write to a pixel on the screen? Just copy a few bytes to the RAM addresses that contained the screen data and the next go around on drawing the screen it would show up. Sometime in the late 90s the pendulum started to swing back and now it feels like we're almost at full tilt the wrong way again despite all the demonstrations to the contrary that it was the wrong way to do things, paradoxically this seemed to happen after the open source revolution transformed software. In the meanwhile, layers and layers and layers of stuff ended up being built in the meanwhile and now the bulk of software that runs is some kind of weird middle-ware that nobody even remotely understands. We're sitting on towers and towers of this stuff. Here's a demo of an entire GUI OS with web browser that could fit in and boot off of a 1.4MB floppy disk and run on a 386 with 8MB of RAM. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_VlI6IBEJ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_VlI6IBEJ0 I would bet that most people using this site today would be pretty happy today if something not much better than this was their work environment. People are surprised when somebody demonstrates that halfway decent consumer hardware can outperform multi-node distributed compute clusters on many tasks and all it took was somebody bothering to write decent code for it. Hell, we even already have the tools to do this well today: https://aadrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-than-your-hadoop-cluster.html https://aadrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-th... http://www.frankmcsherry.org/graph/scalability/cost/2015/01/15/COST.html http://www.frankmcsherry.org/graph/scalability/cost/2015/01/... There's an argument that developer time is worth more than machine time, but what about user time? If I write something that's used or impacts a million people, maybe spending an extra month writing some good low-level code is worth it. Thankfully, and for whatever reasons, we're starting to hear some lone voices of sanity. We've largely stopped jamming up network pipes with overly verbose data interchange languages, the absurdity of text editors consuming multi-core and multi-GB system resources is being noticed, machines capable of trillions of operations per second taking seconds to do simple tasks and so on...it's being noticed. Here's an old post I write on this some more, keep in mind I'm a lousy programmer with limited skills at code optimization, and the list of anecdotes at the end of that post has grown a bit since then. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902739 and another discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9001618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9001618
erlend_sh 9y ago
You should do an in depth review of Redox OS and let them know your thoughts.
NotUsingLinux 9y ago
Hi Josh, You raise some interesting points in your article. I wonder how to comment or discuss this the most efficient way (here or elsewhere?) Some questions: Have you looked at haiku? What you describe as modules, I think Alan Kay calls "objects" in the smalltalk/Xerox tradition. Have you looked at his research project: STEPS reinventing programming? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyIQKBzIuBY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyIQKBzIuBY Some bits and parts of this is open source. Imagine a full system running on 10000 LoC I think this could be a step forward. Also this blurs if not throws away the distinction between "desktop and web(remote)" applications. Because if integration of remote objects is sandboxed but still transparent you get improved usability. Also I think you go not far enough. Databases for file system are fine but I think the ida of widgets or UI libraries altogether is not feasible anymore. The system has to adopt to a individual level, people have different needs and workflows. Highly adoptable and conversational interfaces are needed. WDYT?
- joshmarinacci 9y ago
  Yep. I'm very familiar with STEPS. It's what makes me think that it is actually possible to build a new open source OS.
erikb 9y ago
Well I suggest trying to lean back, reading the feedback points again, and trying to understand what makes people think that way. I bet a UX focussed person can take that into consideration and craft a final version of this article that answers such kind of questions before they even come up. ;-)
daveheq 9y ago
I disagree with you on a lot of things here. Files in two places will confuse people. Expecting a computer to know what hand gestures you're making requires a camera which can be more mistake-prone than voice, and like watching your eyes, a lot of people will just find this creepy. Limiting people to drag-n-drop or cut-n-paste will aggravate half of the userbase (and I use either one depending on the situation). A lot of your requirements for a "modern" OS are pie-in-the-sky or just seem very particular to your taste. I didn't much here that you want that I preferred, so outside of the bloat (especially Windows and Ubunto requiring GPUs to process 3-D effects), I see more disadvantages with your changes than otherwise.
memsom 9y ago
The BeOS stuff you mention is sort of true, but not really. BeOS once had a full on database based file system, but that's not BFS. The OFS (Old File System - what they called it with in BeOS) had full on no holds barred database storage. But the performance sucked, synching the metatdata in the file system and database (which were different structures apparently) was a bit flakey, and the base for the way the filesystem worked was incompatible with integrating other file systems in to the OS. Dominic Giampaolo and Cyril Meurillon ended up creating a whole new base for the file system with VFS layer, etc. As part of that the BFS file system was created. This incorperated a subset of what the file system used to be able to do - it had extended attributes (for adding arbitrary data to the file), a query layer to allow querying those attributes and a mechanism for live queries that would allow the data to dynamically update. But it wasn't really a database in the same way WinFS was meany to be - i.e. built on top of SQL Server.

jlundberg 9y ago

Thanks Josh for publishing your naive article early. Reading it and a bunch of the comments was the best read this week. History has yet to concide open desktop operating systems in favour for smartphone era silo platforms.

joshmarinacci 9y ago
I feel the answer, at least for desktop, is going to be some sort of hybrid between the app store model of smartphones and the upstream packager model of Linux distros. What I'd really like to see is some data viz and machine learning tools to analyze the dependencies of open source software, and then intelligently cut extra strings. Fewer deps makes more reliable software.

bitmapbrother 9y ago

You've probably heard of Google's new OS Fuchsia. What are your thoughts of the technology decisions they've made so far?

joshmarinacci 9y ago
They haven't talked about it much, but the idea of no initial permissions is a good one. Today the OS must fundamentally not trust any application. Permissions at install time are a good idea. Permissions at use time is an even better idea. Provenance also helps. But nothing beats sandboxing the app as much as possible. There's no silver bullets here, but we might be able to silver plate a few.
- Gaelan 9y ago
  > Today the OS must fundamentally not trust any application. I entirely agree. > Permissions at install time are a good idea. I'm actually not so sure about this. I think the "iOS model" of asking for permissions when necessary is much better than the "Android model"* of a big list of permissions on install, preventing use of the app if any of them aren't granted (leading to users giving apps less scrutiny over their permissions than than they would under the iOS model). * I believe some recent versions of Android (M?) may support the "iOS model" in some form.
  - teolandon 9y ago
    Recent Android versions have a pretty good system in place. The apps still work even without some permissions (for example Instagram can work for browsing, but won't be able to take any pictures without the camera permission), and you can easily review the permissions you have granted to any app, and revoke them after the fact. Now, the real problem is that permissions are too general. The "access/read/write files" permission is all grouped up in one place, so you end up with tons of directory for every app in your root directory (that don't get deleted when uninstalling the apps that generated them), and you allow unnecessary access to other files as well. Or the network permission, which could lead to all sorts of traffic, while many developers just need it for ads.

joshmarinacci 9y ago

Correction, 110+ people have signed up now. Wow!

unicornporn 9y ago
If you want even more people to sign up, you may want to edit your post to include the URL to the list[1] in your original post. It took me quite some time to find it as you called it a discussion list here on HN and a “group” on your blog post. [1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/idealos-design https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/idealos-design

vacri 9y ago

> My point is that the technology isn't that hard. I disagree - the technology is extremely hard. You're talking centuries of staff-hours to make your OS, if you want it to be a robust general-purpose OS and not a toy. Just the bit where you say you want the computer to scan what's in your hands and identify it? That in itself is extraordinarily difficult. You mischaracterise the task at hand by pretending it's simple.

edraferi 9y ago
I think the article gave that as an example of what the system should enable, rather than a prerequisite for launch. The system wide message bus and semantic shortcuts features should make it really easy for developers of advanced peripherals to plug into the system. For example, a Kinect would be a lot more useful in ideal OS. You could bind gestures to window manager commands, for example.
- chaboud 9y ago
  Unfortunately, it's wholly impractical to do real work with message busses alone if you want to maximize performance. See: Every performance inter-process system ever... Could we cover a number of cases with copy-on-write semantics and system transactional memory? Sure, but the tech isn't broadly available yet, and it wouldn't cover everything. Sometimes you just need to share a memory mapping and atomically flip a pointer...
  - joshmarinacci 9y ago
    It doesn't have to be implemented as a message bus. It should just be a message bus semantically. Under the hood we could implement all sorts of tricks to make it faster, as long as the applications don't notice the difference.
    - chaboud 9y ago
      I would expect that to work to a point, but coherence and interlocking are eventually going to rear their ugly heads. I've created and lived with multiple inter-process high-performance multimedia/data systems (e.g. video special effects and editing, real-time audio processing, bioinformatics), and I've yet to encounter a message passing semantic that could match the performance of manually managed systems for the broad range of non-pathological use-cases, not to speak of the broader range of theoretically possible use-cases. If something's out there, I'd love to see it. So far as I know, nobody has cracked that nut yet.

jitix 9y ago

Thanks for writing this! I have especially been waiting for the next release of some OS to have something revolutionary for people who use the computers as workstations.. but at this point most updates seem to be about voice automation, accessibility, sync and other "mobile" features.. I have wanted a DBFS for a long time for both personal and work files, and my huge multimedia collection.. secondly the ability to pipe data from one GUI app to another will help us immensely.. its the main reason I feel more productive while using CLI.

bane 9y ago

Thanks for writing this. I think many of your observations are correct (and agree with them). I'm not as sold on your solutions though. Here's some thoughts: Abstractions are a correct way to do things when we don't know what "correct" is or need to deal with lots of unknowns in a general way. And then when you need to aggregate lots of different abstractions together, it's often easier to sit yet another abstraction on top of that. However, in many cases we have enough experience to know what we really need. There's no shame in capturing this knowledge and then "specializing" again to optimize things. In the grand 'ol days, this also meant that the hardware was a true partner of the software rather than an IP restricted piece of black magic sealed behind 20 layers of firewalled software. (At first this wasn't entirely true, some vendors like Atari were almost allergic to letting developers know what was going on, but the trend reversed for a while). Did you want to write to a pixel on the screen? Just copy a few bytes to the RAM addresses that contained the screen data and the next go around on drawing the screen it would show up. Sometime in the late 90s the pendulum started to swing back and now it feels like we're almost at full tilt the wrong way again despite all the demonstrations to the contrary that it was the wrong way to do things, paradoxically this seemed to happen after the open source revolution transformed software. In the meanwhile, layers and layers and layers of stuff ended up being built in the meanwhile and now the bulk of software that runs is some kind of weird middle-ware that nobody even remotely understands. We're sitting on towers and towers of this stuff. Here's a demo of an entire GUI OS with web browser that could fit in and boot off of a 1.4MB floppy disk and run on a 386 with 8MB of RAM. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_VlI6IBEJ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_VlI6IBEJ0 I would bet that most people using this site today would be pretty happy today if something not much better than this was their work environment. People are surprised when somebody demonstrates that halfway decent consumer hardware can outperform multi-node distributed compute clusters on many tasks and all it took was somebody bothering to write decent code for it. Hell, we even already have the tools to do this well today: https://aadrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-than-your-hadoop-cluster.html https://aadrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-th... http://www.frankmcsherry.org/graph/scalability/cost/2015/01/15/COST.html http://www.frankmcsherry.org/graph/scalability/cost/2015/01/... There's an argument that developer time is worth more than machine time, but what about user time? If I write something that's used or impacts a million people, maybe spending an extra month writing some good low-level code is worth it. Thankfully, and for whatever reasons, we're starting to hear some lone voices of sanity. We've largely stopped jamming up network pipes with overly verbose data interchange languages, the absurdity of text editors consuming multi-core and multi-GB system resources is being noticed, machines capable of trillions of operations per second taking seconds to do simple tasks and so on...it's being noticed. Here's an old post I write on this some more, keep in mind I'm a lousy programmer with limited skills at code optimization, and the list of anecdotes at the end of that post has grown a bit since then. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902739 and another discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9001618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9001618

erlend_sh 9y ago

You should do an in depth review of Redox OS and let them know your thoughts.

NotUsingLinux 9y ago

Hi Josh, You raise some interesting points in your article. I wonder how to comment or discuss this the most efficient way (here or elsewhere?) Some questions: Have you looked at haiku? What you describe as modules, I think Alan Kay calls "objects" in the smalltalk/Xerox tradition. Have you looked at his research project: STEPS reinventing programming? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyIQKBzIuBY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyIQKBzIuBY Some bits and parts of this is open source. Imagine a full system running on 10000 LoC I think this could be a step forward. Also this blurs if not throws away the distinction between "desktop and web(remote)" applications. Because if integration of remote objects is sandboxed but still transparent you get improved usability. Also I think you go not far enough. Databases for file system are fine but I think the ida of widgets or UI libraries altogether is not feasible anymore. The system has to adopt to a individual level, people have different needs and workflows. Highly adoptable and conversational interfaces are needed. WDYT?

joshmarinacci 9y ago
Yep. I'm very familiar with STEPS. It's what makes me think that it is actually possible to build a new open source OS.

erikb 9y ago

Well I suggest trying to lean back, reading the feedback points again, and trying to understand what makes people think that way. I bet a UX focussed person can take that into consideration and craft a final version of this article that answers such kind of questions before they even come up. ;-)

daveheq 9y ago

I disagree with you on a lot of things here. Files in two places will confuse people. Expecting a computer to know what hand gestures you're making requires a camera which can be more mistake-prone than voice, and like watching your eyes, a lot of people will just find this creepy. Limiting people to drag-n-drop or cut-n-paste will aggravate half of the userbase (and I use either one depending on the situation). A lot of your requirements for a "modern" OS are pie-in-the-sky or just seem very particular to your taste. I didn't much here that you want that I preferred, so outside of the bloat (especially Windows and Ubunto requiring GPUs to process 3-D effects), I see more disadvantages with your changes than otherwise.

memsom 9y ago

The BeOS stuff you mention is sort of true, but not really. BeOS once had a full on database based file system, but that's not BFS. The OFS (Old File System - what they called it with in BeOS) had full on no holds barred database storage. But the performance sucked, synching the metatdata in the file system and database (which were different structures apparently) was a bit flakey, and the base for the way the filesystem worked was incompatible with integrating other file systems in to the OS. Dominic Giampaolo and Cyril Meurillon ended up creating a whole new base for the file system with VFS layer, etc. As part of that the BFS file system was created. This incorperated a subset of what the file system used to be able to do - it had extended attributes (for adding arbitrary data to the file), a query layer to allow querying those attributes and a mechanism for live queries that would allow the data to dynamically update. But it wasn't really a database in the same way WinFS was meany to be - i.e. built on top of SQL Server.