

Ask HN: Who's innovating in desktop operating systems? - itistoday2

With Apple dropping the ball with Yosemite, I am keeping an eye out for alternatives. I’m hoping someone will pick up that ball and provide the world with an easy-to-use, “intelligently designed”, innovative, secure operating system that is performant and doesn’t kill your laptop’s battery life.
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pedalpete
I'm somewhat keen to try Ubuntu on a touch device, but I've been a Windows
stickler for years. I tried to switch to OSX but Mac always remained my
secondary machine. I just felt that all the 'it just works' stuff was mostly
just marketing speak. Sure it was nice to have a Unix compatible shell and
have all my Ruby Gems work without issue, but once I moved to Node.js as my
main server-side platform, the issue basically disappeared.

There is lots of talk about Windows 10, is it 'intelligently designed'? I'm
not sure, it is fixing the errors made in Windows 8, it is definitely more
innovative than OSX, not sure where it falls on the innovation curve compared
to Ubuntu Touch.

I think if you want to be getting a future ready desktop OS, you can't ignore
the importance of touch, and with HoloLens coming, getting yourself
comfortable on a Windows OS may be a good idea. I'm amazed that as Apple lead
the way with touch on devices, they have ignored the benefit of touch for the
desktop OS. I don't use it all the time, but it's nice to have every once in a
while, and I suspect it will only become more important in the future.

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raquo
Meh. I wasn't excited by any OS releases for a while now.

I'm normally using OSX, but I give Ubuntu a chance on every LTS release. Every
time there are less and less dealbreakers, but the thing is – the downsides of
switching are quite real and immediate, while the upsides are mostly
idealistic.

So the operating systems ceased to be a thing on my radar. I just accept them
as very basic tools that they are, and spend my energy elsewhere.

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jtfairbank
Checkout Paperspace- it's an OS as a service, so you can access a powerful
computer and all your data from any device.

[https://paperspace.io/](https://paperspace.io/)

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DTE
Thanks for the shoutout :) (Paperspace cofounder here) Just to followup a bit
- we let you run an full desktop computer in a web browser (we host the
machine for you, so its fully managed). This means you can turn a macbook air
or chromebook into a powerful machine. If battery is a concern, it might be a
great fit.

We are still in a closed beta but shoot me an email dte@paperspace.io if that
sounds interesting.

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S4M
That sounds interesting, but what is the usage you expect your customers to
make out of it? If it's for number crunching, I can rent a powerful VM for
Digital Ocean or similar company; I don't think it will work for video games
since I expect a small lag between sometimes.

Also, it's dependent of having an internet connection, which is not always the
case.

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jamespcole2
Try UbuntuGnome 14.04 LTS, I use it daily and can highly recommend it. I've
tried a ton of different OS and UI and always keep coming back to UbuntuGnome

