feels like there’s never been a better time for a new desktop OS to emerge…
there’s less platform lock-in than ever, thanks to web apps (and maybe Wine or VMs)
macOS isn’t so great anymore, windows is full of ads
what would it look like to design an OS for the web era? for the ai era?
three things i’d try:
1. rethink the interface — there’s no way that current OS designs that’ve lasted 25 years are the end state of computing (this was the thesis of arc, btw!)
2. treat web apps and native apps the same. treat web docs and native docs the same.
3. new horizontal primitives. when you stop to think about it, it’s *so cool* that copy and paste actually works across every app. what’s the next clipboard, or the next url?
@nate A lot of this was tried 10 years ago in the early days of GNOME 3. It had a new multitasking paradigm, web app integration, system-wide search, activity history, chat integration, etc.
Some of this worked out well, but especially stuff around horizontal primitives has largely not panned out, in large part because getting third party apps to support them is really hard if you're a small platform.
Same with KDE and some Freedesktop initiatives. There was even the effort to unify instant messaging services in Telepathy that was integrated with the system. Not to mention Nepomuk and semantic search.
We still have KIO to make remote or "virtual" resources appear as files and folders. And KRunner can still be used to provide some unified search but a few third party apps take advantage of it.
And sadly tabs in title bars to make windows behave more like browser tabs are gone.
