I've been thinking a lot about the problem of modern desktop operating systems myself over the past year. I believe that desktop operating system environments peaked last decade. The Mac's high water mark was Snow Leopard, the Linux desktop appeared to have gained momentum with the increasing refinement of GNOME 2 during the latter half of the 2000's, and for me the finest Windows releases were Windows 2000 and Windows 7. Unfortunately both the Linux desktop and Windows took a step in the wrong direction when smartphones and tablets became popular and the maintainers of those desktops believed that the desktop environments should resemble the environments of these new mobile devices. This led to regressions such as early GNOME 3 and Windows 8. GNOME 3 has improved over the years and Windows 10 is an improvement over Windows 8, but GNOME 2 and Windows 7, in my opinion, are still better than their latest successors. Apple thankfully didn't follow the footsteps of GNOME and Windows, but I feel that the Mac has stagnated since Snow Leopard.
I agree with the author of this article that desktop operating systems should develop into workstation operating systems. They should be able to facilitate our workflows, and ideally they should be programmable (which I have some more thoughts about in my next paragraph). In my opinion the interface should fully embrace the fact that it is a workstation and not a passive media consumption device. It should, in my opinion, be a "back to basics" one, something like the classic Windows 95 interface or the Platinum Mac OS interface.
One of the thoughts that I've been thinking about over the years is the lack of programmability in contemporary desktop GUIs. The environments of MS-DOS and early home computers highly encouraged users to write programs and scripts to enhance their work environment. Unix goes a step further with the idea of pipes in order to connect different tools together. Finally, the ultimate form of programmability and interaction would resemble the Smalltalk environment, where objects could send messages to each other. What would be amazing would be some sort of Smalltalk-esque GUI environment, where GUI applications could interact with each other using message passing. Unfortunately Apple and Microsoft didn't copy this from Xerox, instead only focusing on the GUI in the early 1980s and then later in the 1980s focusing on providing an object-oriented API for GUI services (this would be realized with NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP/Cocoa, which inspired failed copycat efforts such as Microsoft Cairo and Apple/IBM Taligent, but later on inspired successful platforms such as the Java API and Microsoft .NET). The result today is largely unprogrammable GUI applications, though there are some workarounds such as AppleScript and Visual Basic for Applications (though it's far from the Smalltalk-esque idea). The article's suggestion for having some sort of standardized JSON application interface would be an improvement over the status quo.
I would love to work on such an operating system: a programmable GUI influenced by the underpinnings of Smalltalk and Symbolics Genera plus the interface and UI guidelines of the classic Mac OS. The result would be a desktop operating system that is unabashedly for desktop computer users. It would be both easy to use and easy to control.
A lot of hate in this thread seems against even discussing this, but I think it's worth exploring.
I usually refer to some of these groups of ideas as "composability of workspaces". People question why you would want to dock or undock a tab from different apps, but we already work like this a lot when we use modern IDEs and web browsers. I'd argue that Emacs and Linux CLI still has a lot of appeal for this reason of workspace composability.
Are we better thinking and debating about how we want computational environments to exist, or simply hope that the next version of iOS or Windows 'does not suck'? Will we be able to seamlessly compute across multiple devices; will OSes become specialized? What would be optimal?
There are social, economic (scarcity of programmer time), and institutional limitations to undertaking huge projects. But that doesn't rule out any type of progress toward a long-term goal, or prevent people from booking small wins.
I agree with the author of this article that desktop operating systems should develop into workstation operating systems. They should be able to facilitate our workflows, and ideally they should be programmable (which I have some more thoughts about in my next paragraph). In my opinion the interface should fully embrace the fact that it is a workstation and not a passive media consumption device. It should, in my opinion, be a "back to basics" one, something like the classic Windows 95 interface or the Platinum Mac OS interface.
One of the thoughts that I've been thinking about over the years is the lack of programmability in contemporary desktop GUIs. The environments of MS-DOS and early home computers highly encouraged users to write programs and scripts to enhance their work environment. Unix goes a step further with the idea of pipes in order to connect different tools together. Finally, the ultimate form of programmability and interaction would resemble the Smalltalk environment, where objects could send messages to each other. What would be amazing would be some sort of Smalltalk-esque GUI environment, where GUI applications could interact with each other using message passing. Unfortunately Apple and Microsoft didn't copy this from Xerox, instead only focusing on the GUI in the early 1980s and then later in the 1980s focusing on providing an object-oriented API for GUI services (this would be realized with NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP/Cocoa, which inspired failed copycat efforts such as Microsoft Cairo and Apple/IBM Taligent, but later on inspired successful platforms such as the Java API and Microsoft .NET). The result today is largely unprogrammable GUI applications, though there are some workarounds such as AppleScript and Visual Basic for Applications (though it's far from the Smalltalk-esque idea). The article's suggestion for having some sort of standardized JSON application interface would be an improvement over the status quo.
I would love to work on such an operating system: a programmable GUI influenced by the underpinnings of Smalltalk and Symbolics Genera plus the interface and UI guidelines of the classic Mac OS. The result would be a desktop operating system that is unabashedly for desktop computer users. It would be both easy to use and easy to control.