
The Future of the Operating System: Revisited, Part 1 - NetOpWibby
https://blog.webb.page/2019/future-of-the-operating-system-revisited-i
======
scandox
My long term bet: computing will move towards an interface driven by "emoji as
command". Custom iconography will fade out as the interoperability (and
familiarity) of popular unicode symbols becomes dominant. So much of the
existing textual input we use is designed to overcome the limitations of our
software. In the future if you want to go home then you'll ⌂. If you want to
go to the supermarket then you'll U+1F6D2. Once the AI knows your usual
supermarket then that's where it will bring you. A complete shorthand for
interpersonal communication will spring up, obviating the need to express the
kind of nuance that we use presently solely to delude ourselves that we have
something to say that can't be statistically derived from the total sum of
former human communication.

Meanwhile I'll be in my sweet, sweet grave.

Edit: looks like HN can't show the shopping trolley

~~~
simonh
In the 80s a pundit predicted that in the future the interface to spreadsheets
would be a games controller, because that's what the kids were growing up with
and would want to use when they grew up. Then 10 years ago it was txt shrt
abrvs wr t ftr. Except actually they were just the product of now ridiculously
dated numeric keypad input the kids of today know nothing about.

The latest kids craze is always the wave of the future, except actually it's
usually just a craze and will end up looking just as dated as the Rubik's
Cube.

~~~
rijoja
It's a thought worth considering though. Basically you have your fingers at
the "home row" at all times, so no delay or errors from travel. Also you have
analog input instead of digital!

I'd say that the market have optimized creativly the gamepads to near 1:1
through put w/o having to think about backwards compatility.

What holds us back is the vast majority of minimum effort pencil pushers who
want to spend 8 hours at work and don't care if things get done. They would
never see the idea of making their job go faster say by a better keyboard and
or by writing a nifty script to automate some dull toil. As long as they have
a legally protected job they'll just go there 8 hours a day and don't care if
they are doing something that could be automated in an hour!

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timw4mail
Is my scrollwheel broken? Oh, no, somebody just abused Javascript events for a
horizontal scroll.

~~~
owaislone
The scrolling is so horrible on this page. Only way I can move forward (right)
is by scrolling up and one full swipe on my track pad moves it ~200 pixels.

~~~
BanazirGalbasi
I had the same experience, but I found that the arrow keys worked fairly well
for moving side-to-side. The presence of a workaround still doesn't make this
kind of thing acceptable though.

~~~
AlbertoGP
I’m a fan of multi-column layouts horizontal scrolling but this one is badly
done. The scrolling speed is wrong; might be calibrated for the author’s
pointer device, because they vary a lot, both among devices and among
operative systems. There is no way to get it right.

The mapping of vertical scroll to horizontal scroll is something that should
be done by the browser when using a multi-column layout.

My most recent attempt is this: [https://sentido-
labs.com/en/library/201904240732/Xanadu%20Hy...](https://sentido-
labs.com/en/library/201904240732/Xanadu%20Hypertext%20Documents.html)

Right after the title there is a checkbox, checked by default, that when
unchecked will lay the document out with multi-column chapters and horizontal
scroll inside a chapter, vertical scroll to move between chapters.

I use a touchpad which allows horizontal scrolling so there is no need to
remap v-scroll to h-scroll, but that would not work with most mice that only
have a plain scroll wheel.

In practice, I too find the cursor keys (also try page-up/-down) the most
comfortable way. It’s still jankier than it should but I hope that browsers’
handling of CSS scroll snap points will improve.

Although the multi-column layout works well for me, it does not for most
people because of limitations in both the browser and their input devices, so
I had to make single-column the default.

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lone_haxx0r
We want to send a spaceship to the moon but we haven't even made a decent car
yet.

There is not a single good desktop operating system. Am I the only one that
has noticed this? I hope not.

Windows sucks, Linux distros suck, MacOS sucks, but each one sucks in a
different way. Our whole civilization depends on desktop computers, and they
run crappy software. I wonder how haven't we all died because of the
unreliability of our software stack.

I don't care about weird mobile things that are always connected to my watch
running javascript. I want a computer --a regular, personal computer-- that
works well, looks decently good, with a nice user interface and that doesn't
spy on me. Is that too much to ask?

~~~
linguae
I wholeheartedly agree. While the technical underpinnings of today's desktop
operating systems have never been better (we have come a long way from DOS-
based Windows and the somewhat unstable classic Mac OS), I feel that we have
experienced a decline in the user experience.

I personally believe that Windows 2000 was the best version of Windows despite
its security issues. Windows 10 is technically better, especially with its
Windows Subsystem for Linux layer, but unfortunately Windows 10 doesn't
support Classic Mode like earlier versions of Windows, and I find Windows 10's
telemetry, advertising, notifications, and mandatory updates highly annoying.
Windows would be a great OS if it weren't for its annoyances, which is why I
hope that one day ReactOS catches up with Windows 10 in terms of
compatibility.

I personally love macOS, but its EULA ties it to Apple hardware, which I've
become increasingly disappointed with. And, quite frankly, I have a soft spot
for the simplicity and consistency of the classic Mac OS, even if its
architecture needed a complete re-haul.

As for desktop Linux, while it definitely has all of the components necessary
for a modern OS, it lacks the fit-and-finish that macOS has. Part of it is due
to the very nature of the development of desktop Linux. Unlike Windows and
macOS where Microsoft and Apple, respectively, have control of the entire
stack from the kernel all the way to bundled applications like WordPad, Edge,
and Safari, in desktop Linux each component is part of a completely different
project that is made by different developer teams who have very different
goals, which are often not aligned with a larger vision of providing a
coherent desktop experience. Now, one can find greater consistency by sticking
to applications that follow the GNOME and KDE user guidelines. However, many
applications don't follow either one of these guidelines. I find that Linux
distributions have the uphill battle of trying to create a consistent,
coherent environment out of a collection of discrete, disparate parts. The
result is a system that may very well be just as full-featured as Windows and
macOS, but it feels more like a collection of parts rather than one coherent
system, which becomes apparent whenever something breaks.

I would love to use a desktop operating system that provides coherency and
consistency while also allowing the user to have full control over his or her
environment. I also want to use a desktop OS that is also unabashedly and
unashamedly a desktop OS and not one that tries to integrate a user experience
that is more suited to mobile devices rather than desktop computers.

Unfortunately operating systems are very capital-intensive to build. This blog
post ([http://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2019/06/my-2019-mac-
pro...](http://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2019/06/my-2019-mac-pro-
disappointment-and.html)) contains more information about what it would take
to build the type of system that I would love to migrate to.

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AnIdiotOnTheNet
I disagree with the article's conclusion. I think the reason the desktop
metaphor with files and folders has stuck around so long is because it is
actually a pretty good, and neatly simple, abstraction of how things actually
are.

~~~
hateful
Every new OS, it seems - mobile or desktop - seems to go out of its way to
hide my files from me. On Windows 10, the "C" drive isn't listed until you go
one level deep.

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diegoperini
Unpopular idea of mine (not invented by me oc): Horizontal scrolling is a
great idea. The only reason it is annoying in this site is because there is no
first class support for it in many touchpads and physical mouses.

~~~
swiley
if you're talking about paragraphs: DEAR GOD NO.

Paragraphs should be 40-80 ems wide if you want them to be readable. My phone
has first class support for horizontal scrolling and it still sucks.

Now if you're just talking about window management then yes I totally agree
with you (See X11 "pagers" (a different approach to "workspaces") that are
part of FVWM and TWM.)

Edit: I should probably include an argument instead of just an opinion:
obviously scrolling is a necessity, you can’t fit all the information you want
on one screen and paging is (IMO) generally worse. When you’re reading a
document or paragraph you’re concerned about context. Really scrolling here in
general is bad but you’re moving left and right so often enough that it makes
the most sense to just wrap text and have vertical scrolling (with an image
the scrolling direction really doesn’t matter it just sucks in general.)
switching windows (or whatever) usually indicates some kind of mental context
switch (looking at a different source file, looking at build errors, etc.) and
so it doesn’t matter so much if you have to scroll (Although you’d naturally
try to keep things with shared context close, preferably within one physical
screen of each other, because no scrolling is still always better.)

~~~
contextfree
I think the idea is to have multiple columns on screen (like some print
magazine and newspaper layouts) so each paragraph is still 40-80em like you
say, but you just see more of them at once. (this was roughly the Windows 8
layout guidance)

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rijoja
Why not go closer to the UNIX abstractions but with modern graphics and
utilities instead of away from it. So in essence the commands and structures
of UNIX files (nodes) and directory structures (graphs) but presented via
state of the art visualization methods?

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messe
What's with the bizarre horizontal scrolling?

~~~
notacoward
Bizarre and _flaky_. Couldn't read. Apparently the author is an advocate for
responsive design (as though that had anything to do with operating systems).
I guess thwarting the user is a kind of response.

~~~
fixmycode
the mobile experience is fine, but opening an image for a closer look won't
save your scrolling position when you get back

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scroot
If you look at how far a regular user could get in the 90s with Applescript,
Hypercard, and the Classic Mac OS, today's systems are quite underwhelming by
comparison.

I have no doubt that all the Unix based systems of today are more stable and
faster than the older (and more diverse) crop of personal computing operating
systems, but these systems lack the kind of true computing power that older
systems provided to regular users.

Smalltalk systems are another kind of vision for what a personal computing
operating system could be like: no "applications" or "files," just a sea of
computing structures called objects and levels of metaphor and abstraction
that give regular users powerful ways to interact with them.

Today if users want to go just a step beyond what their shrnkwrapped programs
can do -- and trust me, that happens all the time -- they have two options:
either buy some plugin or other program that hopefully does the job, or learn
a full-fledged general programming language from the ground up and then apply
it to the problem. That's pretty sad -- doubly sad, considering the core
metaphor of most operating systems today is a teletype!

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PeterCorless
The UI of this article seems to break my browser. The horizontal scrolling
only gets about as far as the terminal UI image and then stalls out. Can't pan
further right. It made me think "The future of the OS is trying to do c.
1986-ish basic mouse controls."

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gnode
Although referred to as a joke, I really like the look of eDEX-UI, and I look
forward to trying it out. I have a tablet running Ubuntu which I mostly use
for writing and freehand drawing, and it'd be nice to use it for other things
(particularly terminal based programs) without having to attach peripherals to
make the UI usable.

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yuchi
Nice mini write up. Author, if you hear me, you either use a dot grid as a
background AND you align text and images to it, or you don’t use the dot grid
background. My OCD was killing me.

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otikik
"Toggle Reader View" -> Much better experience.

