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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 a

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-window managers with their own desktop philosophies, there are entire terminal drawing frameworks with full GUI support. Desktop is awesome. If anything mobile is the one needing to catch up. iOS and Android are awful, awful environments outside of casual usage. Just try writing up a document on your phone! Just imagine what could be if they were on the level _desktops_? 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? To paraprashe Mr. Engelbart: it's a failed tool if you use it exactly the same way the day you bought it and a year after.

linguae 6y ago
"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?" To quote a commonly-used Web meme: "Why not both?" In my opinion, why should a software tool only have one interface to it? What if there were many possible interfaces available, from very simple interfaces with reasonable defaults for casual users, to more option-rich interfaces for power users, to an API for programmers. What if we could take advantage of today's AI technology to automatically construct GUIs that are tailored to a user's experience level? What if users could customize the GUIs in order to make the GUI fit their needs better? What if the system supported a variety of languages, not only common languages such as Python that many programmers are familiar with, but also beginner-friendly languages? Users are willing to program provided it's not too difficult: AppleScript from the 1990s was a step in the right direction, and Excel's macro language is probably the most widely-used programming language in the world. With today's AI/NLP technology, we could go further by developing ways for users to describe repetitive, routine tasks using natural language. I think there's still a lot of room for innovation on the desktop. But you highlight a very big problem: where is the market? Who is going to pay for this innovation? Outside of open-source projects, the major commercial desktop environments are platforms controlled by multi-billion dollar corporations. Building a new desktop environment that is capable of competing against the commercial giants will take a lot of time and capital. The last company to give this a try was Be, Inc. in the mid-1990s, and they had a hard time competing against Microsoft's OEM strategy. I wrote more about this at http://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2020/10/where-did-personal-computing-go-wrong.html http://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2020/10/where-did-perso....
ohazi 6y ago
> Just try writing up a document on your phone! Just imagine what could be if they were on the level _desktops_? It's very, very difficult to beat a keyboard. Tablets and even phones become day vs. night more usable if you plug in a keyboard, even ignoring everything else that still sucks about them.
- ptidhomme 6y ago
  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.
  - fendy3002 6y ago
    That's for sentences, but documents usually contains more than just sentences. Even document numbers have symbols and numbers which cannot take advantage of Swype tech
  - Ygg2 6y ago
    I tried writing non english words with those swipe keyboards (on Android, mind you). I had a horrible time.
    - tsimionescu 6y ago
      I can't agree with the grandparent about type + swipe being anywhere near the speed of a keyboard, but in my experience, writing in other languages using swipe is just as fast as in English (at least for other languages that use the Latin alphabet). I frequently use swiping for bilingual English + Romanian (a language which tends to have much longer words than English) conversations, and it generally works very well, even bilingually. I would note that I'm using some Microsoft keyboard for Android, I forget its name, and it is explicitly configured for both languages.
  - mastazi 6y ago
    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
trabant00 6y ago
> or we try to move our society to be more techn savy as we are clearly moving to a more tech relying world This is what I telling non technical friends for years now: as they spend more and more time with computers and the internet the investment to learn what is under the hood and to have more efficient interaction with better tools becomes worth it more and more. You can't say any more you don't fancy or care about IT when you spend hours each day on a computer.
rtpg 6y ago
Here are some mobile concepts that I miss on OS: - not thinking about files: I can open Notes/Drafts on my phone and get a textbox. I kinda get this with Joplin, barely. - Real sandboxing, with a nice permission layer - Extremely easy sharing of data between apps. Of course files are theoretically a great sharing mechanism, but the sharing mechanism in mobile OS's are the logical conclusion of the clipboard - URIs that go deep into other apps. Lets you easily say "go over here to see details" from a completely separate system The fact that lots of stuff are webapps lets you get pretty far on Desktop too but I think these metaphors are power user features that the desktop could learn from
- swiley 6y ago
  I can open vim on my iphone/desktop and get a textbox. I don't see what storing things in files has to do with that. >Extremely easy sharing of data between apps. hah no. Try sharing large batches of files on iOS. with plenty of apps there's no way to do this (and often the only way to do it if you can is with the files app.)
- ziotom78 6y ago
  I remember that some of these points were targeted by the Étoilé environment [1]. It was a desktop environment targeted for GNUstep and programmed in Objective-C that tried to rethink a few fundamental concepts of the Desktop Environments available at the time (~10 years ago). Among them, proper file versioning for everything, seamless app interoperability and data sharing, etc. Sadly, the developers never managed to go beyond a few core libraries and a nice theme (the GUI used GNUstep under the hood). I followed the development with great interest till they stopped updating the site; I believe that the effort would have required many more developers. What a pity! [1] http://etoileos.com/ http://etoileos.com/
- realusername 6y ago
  To each their own I guess, on my case I which phones would learn from desktop interfaces and let me manage files and apps properly.
- josteink 6y ago
  > not thinking about files And I hate app-data not being files, not being portable. My data may be stuck inside a SaaS and only accessible through a closed-source app, and I have nothing to say about it. > Real sandboxing, with a nice permission layer Sandboxing apps is a good thing. Depending on your use-case, Snap/Flatpak or containers kinda solve this, but they are not the default way of running apps for now. What mobile does wrong here though, is that it also sandboxes the user, not giving the user full access to his device, nor letting him let his apps get that access either. This is user-hostile, on all current major mobile-platforms. > Extremely easy sharing of data between apps I would rephrase this as barely functional sharing, for only the limited subset of data the application has decided to implement sharing for, and only in ways the application-developers have considered inter-app sharing. On a desktop, I as the user, have the power to decide how I want to share data and invent new ways data can be shared and utilized. > URIs that go deep into other apps While that is certainly a neat feature, it's an app-centric feature. How do you know which kind of apps I have installed? How do you know which of those apps within that niché I have installed? And if you're not going to make it app-centric, you have to make it file/data-centric anyway... Which leaves us Android. Android does this better than iOS by having an intent-system which lets you register ability to handle both files, urls and subsets of those, and other apps can query for which apps supports which file/url-intents. So basically just a minor addition to the system we already have had on all desktop OSes for decades now. And again: that's a system which already works really well when files are first-class concepts which everything else builds on. So it's all back to files. If you want to empower the user, you must have files.
bobthepanda 6y ago
> 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, clothing, and sheltering ourselves for exclusive casual usage of <insert offensive stereotype>? There are only so many hours in the day and time in our lives; why hide the benefits of technology behind arbitrary gatekeeping?
- m463 6y ago
  ok, here's your allotment of clothes: pants, shirt, size medium, shoes size 9 I actually think some game user interface ideas should make it to the desktop. Game interfaces are always customizable up-front.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  > Why shouldn't everyone churn their own butter? Why shouldn't everyone sew their own clothes? Selling pre-made butter or clothes doesn't prevent someone from making their own if the pre-made one doesn’t fit their needs. In technology, making your own is often outright impossible due to proprietary APIs In a lot of cases the inefficiency of the official implementation is a feature for the developer and they definitely do not want people to build more efficient clients (examples: no ads/irrelevant content, defaulting to chronological feed instead of algorithmic, etc) and use technical (and sometimes legal, like abusing copyright law) workarounds to make the process as difficult as possible.
- II2II 6y ago
  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 every time we trigger a circuit breaker? We don't need to know how to churn butter, but knowing how to cook is useful. Do we really want to live in a world where we depend upon someone else decides what goes into every meal we eat? Yes, computers are there to do stuff for us and to save time. We should be exploiting that. On the other hand, we should not be reliant upon it to the point where it interferes with control over our own destinies or the creative process.
colechristensen 6y ago
We continue to dumb down interfaces because of the assumption that people won’t learn and the reality that building a complex usable interface is hard and teaching is almost never done. I remember when video games came with elaborate manuals, this discussion reminds me of that and how it stopped happening (and just now the smell of opening the box for a new game, i don’t think i’ll ever experience that again)
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  And yet videogames are prime evidence that users can learn just about any UI you throw at them, if they're even little bit motivated to do it. The Web itself is the second piece of evidence - despite all the UX experts' love for "simplicity" and "intuitiveness", every single website looks entirely unlike any other website. Every UI is different. People manage. It's the assumption that people won't learn that's a problem. Minimizing unnecessary complexity is a good thing, but removing capabilities for sake of further UI simplification is taking things overboard. (I'm forming a new hypothesis that tries to explain why this happens: it's because SaaS products are trying to turn a workflow into a service. So anything that deviates from their perfect workflow, including any flexibility, integration points, or general ability for self-help, is ruthlessly pruned. The users must follow the prescribed workflow.)
coldtea 6y ago
>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? Well, the way of progress has always been simplying operations. Do you know how to fix your car and do you make your own clothes, cheese and bread, in today's "bread and cheese eating", clothes wearing, car driving world?
cookiengineer 6y ago
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.
pjmlp 6y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4 Including the part of being written on a memory safe systems programming language.
- zepto 6y ago
  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!
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    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.
garou 6y ago
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…
wsc981 6y ago
I feel the Classic macOS did one thing quite well. It was rather easy to manage the system. System functionality could be expanded through various means, but most often devs used Extensions. And if a software issue arose, it was easy to disable all Extensions by pressing SHIFT key on start-up. Also, on start-up you'd visually see what Extensions were being loaded. So at start-up you would always be aware what you had installed. In current macOS it's very hard to keep track of what I've installed. I install a lot of stuff using tools like Homebrew. Some software might install some system level hooks, etc... From my perspective it's kinda hard to keep the system "clean". And it's probably a good idea to do a clean install of my computers maybe once every year or so, since I might have installed stuff I don't really use anymore. Also, there was the System Folder and that directory contains the Extensions, Preferences, Control Panels directories, etc... So you could also at the file system level manage your System Folder. You could just delete an Extension manually from Extensions directory in the System Folder to uninstall it. You didn't need any "uninstall" software most of the time. A classic macOS like environment with a view more modern features (maybe a WindowMaker-like UI, multi-user and real multi-tasking) would be pretty neat.
- NickM 6y ago
  I do sometimes wonder if the lack of preemptive multitasking and memory protection in classic Mac OS may have ironically led to better quality software. Users are forced to be less tolerant of bugs if a piece of buggy software can lock up your whole computer.
  - tl 6y ago
    Greater difficulty / risk in development leads to fewer, higher quality applications, but breadth not depth wins the market, so we're stuck mourning dead systems with potential except for cases where depth results in a "killer" application.

linguae 6y ago

"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?" To quote a commonly-used Web meme: "Why not both?" In my opinion, why should a software tool only have one interface to it? What if there were many possible interfaces available, from very simple interfaces with reasonable defaults for casual users, to more option-rich interfaces for power users, to an API for programmers. What if we could take advantage of today's AI technology to automatically construct GUIs that are tailored to a user's experience level? What if users could customize the GUIs in order to make the GUI fit their needs better? What if the system supported a variety of languages, not only common languages such as Python that many programmers are familiar with, but also beginner-friendly languages? Users are willing to program provided it's not too difficult: AppleScript from the 1990s was a step in the right direction, and Excel's macro language is probably the most widely-used programming language in the world. With today's AI/NLP technology, we could go further by developing ways for users to describe repetitive, routine tasks using natural language. I think there's still a lot of room for innovation on the desktop. But you highlight a very big problem: where is the market? Who is going to pay for this innovation? Outside of open-source projects, the major commercial desktop environments are platforms controlled by multi-billion dollar corporations. Building a new desktop environment that is capable of competing against the commercial giants will take a lot of time and capital. The last company to give this a try was Be, Inc. in the mid-1990s, and they had a hard time competing against Microsoft's OEM strategy. I wrote more about this at http://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2020/10/where-did-personal-computing-go-wrong.html http://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2020/10/where-did-perso....

ohazi 6y ago

> Just try writing up a document on your phone! Just imagine what could be if they were on the level _desktops_? It's very, very difficult to beat a keyboard. Tablets and even phones become day vs. night more usable if you plug in a keyboard, even ignoring everything else that still sucks about them.

ptidhomme 6y ago
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.
- fendy3002 6y ago
  That's for sentences, but documents usually contains more than just sentences. Even document numbers have symbols and numbers which cannot take advantage of Swype tech
- Ygg2 6y ago
  I tried writing non english words with those swipe keyboards (on Android, mind you). I had a horrible time.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    I can't agree with the grandparent about type + swipe being anywhere near the speed of a keyboard, but in my experience, writing in other languages using swipe is just as fast as in English (at least for other languages that use the Latin alphabet). I frequently use swiping for bilingual English + Romanian (a language which tends to have much longer words than English) conversations, and it generally works very well, even bilingually. I would note that I'm using some Microsoft keyboard for Android, I forget its name, and it is explicitly configured for both languages.
- mastazi 6y ago
  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

trabant00 6y ago

> or we try to move our society to be more techn savy as we are clearly moving to a more tech relying world This is what I telling non technical friends for years now: as they spend more and more time with computers and the internet the investment to learn what is under the hood and to have more efficient interaction with better tools becomes worth it more and more. You can't say any more you don't fancy or care about IT when you spend hours each day on a computer.

rtpg 6y ago

Here are some mobile concepts that I miss on OS: - not thinking about files: I can open Notes/Drafts on my phone and get a textbox. I kinda get this with Joplin, barely. - Real sandboxing, with a nice permission layer - Extremely easy sharing of data between apps. Of course files are theoretically a great sharing mechanism, but the sharing mechanism in mobile OS's are the logical conclusion of the clipboard - URIs that go deep into other apps. Lets you easily say "go over here to see details" from a completely separate system The fact that lots of stuff are webapps lets you get pretty far on Desktop too but I think these metaphors are power user features that the desktop could learn from

swiley 6y ago
I can open vim on my iphone/desktop and get a textbox. I don't see what storing things in files has to do with that. >Extremely easy sharing of data between apps. hah no. Try sharing large batches of files on iOS. with plenty of apps there's no way to do this (and often the only way to do it if you can is with the files app.)
ziotom78 6y ago
I remember that some of these points were targeted by the Étoilé environment [1]. It was a desktop environment targeted for GNUstep and programmed in Objective-C that tried to rethink a few fundamental concepts of the Desktop Environments available at the time (~10 years ago). Among them, proper file versioning for everything, seamless app interoperability and data sharing, etc. Sadly, the developers never managed to go beyond a few core libraries and a nice theme (the GUI used GNUstep under the hood). I followed the development with great interest till they stopped updating the site; I believe that the effort would have required many more developers. What a pity! [1] http://etoileos.com/ http://etoileos.com/
realusername 6y ago
To each their own I guess, on my case I which phones would learn from desktop interfaces and let me manage files and apps properly.
josteink 6y ago
> not thinking about files And I hate app-data not being files, not being portable. My data may be stuck inside a SaaS and only accessible through a closed-source app, and I have nothing to say about it. > Real sandboxing, with a nice permission layer Sandboxing apps is a good thing. Depending on your use-case, Snap/Flatpak or containers kinda solve this, but they are not the default way of running apps for now. What mobile does wrong here though, is that it also sandboxes the user, not giving the user full access to his device, nor letting him let his apps get that access either. This is user-hostile, on all current major mobile-platforms. > Extremely easy sharing of data between apps I would rephrase this as barely functional sharing, for only the limited subset of data the application has decided to implement sharing for, and only in ways the application-developers have considered inter-app sharing. On a desktop, I as the user, have the power to decide how I want to share data and invent new ways data can be shared and utilized. > URIs that go deep into other apps While that is certainly a neat feature, it's an app-centric feature. How do you know which kind of apps I have installed? How do you know which of those apps within that niché I have installed? And if you're not going to make it app-centric, you have to make it file/data-centric anyway... Which leaves us Android. Android does this better than iOS by having an intent-system which lets you register ability to handle both files, urls and subsets of those, and other apps can query for which apps supports which file/url-intents. So basically just a minor addition to the system we already have had on all desktop OSes for decades now. And again: that's a system which already works really well when files are first-class concepts which everything else builds on. So it's all back to files. If you want to empower the user, you must have files.

bobthepanda 6y ago

> 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, clothing, and sheltering ourselves for exclusive casual usage of <insert offensive stereotype>? There are only so many hours in the day and time in our lives; why hide the benefits of technology behind arbitrary gatekeeping?

m463 6y ago
ok, here's your allotment of clothes: pants, shirt, size medium, shoes size 9 I actually think some game user interface ideas should make it to the desktop. Game interfaces are always customizable up-front.
Nextgrid 6y ago
> Why shouldn't everyone churn their own butter? Why shouldn't everyone sew their own clothes? Selling pre-made butter or clothes doesn't prevent someone from making their own if the pre-made one doesn’t fit their needs. In technology, making your own is often outright impossible due to proprietary APIs In a lot of cases the inefficiency of the official implementation is a feature for the developer and they definitely do not want people to build more efficient clients (examples: no ads/irrelevant content, defaulting to chronological feed instead of algorithmic, etc) and use technical (and sometimes legal, like abusing copyright law) workarounds to make the process as difficult as possible.
II2II 6y ago
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 every time we trigger a circuit breaker? We don't need to know how to churn butter, but knowing how to cook is useful. Do we really want to live in a world where we depend upon someone else decides what goes into every meal we eat? Yes, computers are there to do stuff for us and to save time. We should be exploiting that. On the other hand, we should not be reliant upon it to the point where it interferes with control over our own destinies or the creative process.

colechristensen 6y ago

We continue to dumb down interfaces because of the assumption that people won’t learn and the reality that building a complex usable interface is hard and teaching is almost never done. I remember when video games came with elaborate manuals, this discussion reminds me of that and how it stopped happening (and just now the smell of opening the box for a new game, i don’t think i’ll ever experience that again)

TeMPOraL 6y ago
And yet videogames are prime evidence that users can learn just about any UI you throw at them, if they're even little bit motivated to do it. The Web itself is the second piece of evidence - despite all the UX experts' love for "simplicity" and "intuitiveness", every single website looks entirely unlike any other website. Every UI is different. People manage. It's the assumption that people won't learn that's a problem. Minimizing unnecessary complexity is a good thing, but removing capabilities for sake of further UI simplification is taking things overboard. (I'm forming a new hypothesis that tries to explain why this happens: it's because SaaS products are trying to turn a workflow into a service. So anything that deviates from their perfect workflow, including any flexibility, integration points, or general ability for self-help, is ruthlessly pruned. The users must follow the prescribed workflow.)

coldtea 6y ago

>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? Well, the way of progress has always been simplying operations. Do you know how to fix your car and do you make your own clothes, cheese and bread, in today's "bread and cheese eating", clothes wearing, car driving world?

cookiengineer 6y ago

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.

pjmlp 6y ago

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4 Including the part of being written on a memory safe systems programming language.

zepto 6y ago
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!
- pjmlp 6y ago
  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.

garou 6y ago

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…

wsc981 6y ago

I feel the Classic macOS did one thing quite well. It was rather easy to manage the system. System functionality could be expanded through various means, but most often devs used Extensions. And if a software issue arose, it was easy to disable all Extensions by pressing SHIFT key on start-up. Also, on start-up you'd visually see what Extensions were being loaded. So at start-up you would always be aware what you had installed. In current macOS it's very hard to keep track of what I've installed. I install a lot of stuff using tools like Homebrew. Some software might install some system level hooks, etc... From my perspective it's kinda hard to keep the system "clean". And it's probably a good idea to do a clean install of my computers maybe once every year or so, since I might have installed stuff I don't really use anymore. Also, there was the System Folder and that directory contains the Extensions, Preferences, Control Panels directories, etc... So you could also at the file system level manage your System Folder. You could just delete an Extension manually from Extensions directory in the System Folder to uninstall it. You didn't need any "uninstall" software most of the time. A classic macOS like environment with a view more modern features (maybe a WindowMaker-like UI, multi-user and real multi-tasking) would be pretty neat.

NickM 6y ago
I do sometimes wonder if the lack of preemptive multitasking and memory protection in classic Mac OS may have ironically led to better quality software. Users are forced to be less tolerant of bugs if a piece of buggy software can lock up your whole computer.
- tl 6y ago
  Greater difficulty / risk in development leads to fewer, higher quality applications, but breadth not depth wins the market, so we're stuck mourning dead systems with potential except for cases where depth results in a "killer" application.