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I'm idly curious about whether Microsoft will ever "pull an OS X". In my imagination, they'd drop their whole legacy OS except for an emulation layer, and port
by mbrock 11y ago
I'm idly curious about whether Microsoft will ever "pull an OS X".
In my imagination, they'd drop their whole legacy OS except for an emulation layer, and port their Windows Store stuff to a new platform.
The new platform, as I imagine it, would be based on Linux and focus primarily on web apps and games. One part web-based cross-device UI runtime, one part serious gaming support.
The idea of Microsoft embracing Linux on the desktop is, I think, a popular April's Fools joke, but from my naïve perspective, it seems like a pretty reasonable idea.
I thought OS X was really cool in 2006, and since then I've become gradually more and more annoyed with it. I'm more and more confused by why I need to use this complicated operating system... I feel like its whole paradigm is dated and tedious.
Like when I run out of hard drive space. OS X will tell me with some ugly alert box that "you're out of space." No clue why. I have to download some external software that can figure this out by scanning my drives. Junk keeps accumulating in weird folders that I didn't know existed. I feel like I'm dealing with a huge bureaucracy.
And when I open Finder, for some reason I am presented with a (rather slow) list of, like, all files, in an intimidating and overwhelming way. Of course I know how file systems work, but in the shoes of an everyday computer user, the whole thing is unfriendly and weird.
Then there's the issue of all the overlapping windows that I'm always fidgeting with, resizing, moving, maximizing and unmaximizing. For some reason maximizing and unmaximizing feels like an extremely heavy task for the computer. I don't know why it takes more than a millisecond. It all adds up to make my user experience annoying and like I have to do unnecessary work.
Not to even mention iTunes and the App Store... Jeez! It's enough to make me question the whole narrative of technological progress. I think Microsoft could pretty easily make something convincingly better than all this.
- vezzy-fnord 11y agoSaid "emulation layer" would basically be Wine. I'm afraid this whole MS-Linux speculation is just nonsensical, far fetched fantasy. Dropping Windows entirely is certainly plausible, but they'd probably do it in favor of the Midori OS their research lab has been working on based on the managed runtime aspects they've been learning from Singularity. Of course I know how file systems work, but in the shoes of an everyday computer user, the whole thing is unfriendly and weird. If you consider this to even be a problem, then switching to Linux will not help with this. At all. It will only exacerbate it.
- mbrock 11y agoThanks, I didn't know about Midori. Yeah, it is fantasy. I don't know enough to say whether it's far-fetched. I don't think it's obviously nonsensical. Linux of course has tons of advantages. A huge community, lots of hardware support, open source, etc. Microsoft has been talking about how they "love Linux." Why wouldn't it be a reasonable base for a new platform? Like how Apple went with XNU/Mach/BSD? I'm not really talking about "switching to Linux". I'm talking about building a new operating system that uses Linux as the underlying kernel. Since it's my fantasy, I declare that this new operating system has a very clean and well-organized file manager...
- wvenable 11y agoWindows isn't a legacy OS. The old 95/98 was the legacy OS and it's long gone. Windows is one of the most advanced operating systems and rivals Linux and OS X in many ways. But Microsoft is trying to get out from the shackles of their Win32 history -- the "modern" store apps are only allowed to use a subset of the API.
- zokier 11y agoWinRT and Metro was kinda an attempt of what you describe. NT as a kernel is not that bad compared to eg. classic MacOS that it would be in dire need of replacing. Longhorn and WinFS also was supposed to provide a new paradigm, but that didn't really pan out and we ended up with Vista...