This seems to me to be written by someone who uses MacOS almost exclusively, but has touched Windows just enough to understand it. The complete lack of understanding of IPC, filesystems, scripting, and other OS fundamentals is pretty painful.
>Why can I dock and undock tabs in my web browser or in my file manager, but I can't dock a tab between the two apps? There is no technical reason why this shouldn't be possible. Application windows are just bitmaps at the end of the day, but the OS guys haven't built it because it's not a priority.
I'm an idiot when it comes to operating systems (and sometimes even in general), but even I know why there are issues with that. You need a standardized form of IPC between the two apps, which wouldn't happen because both devs would be convinced their way is the best. On top of that, it's a great way to get an antitrust against you if you aren't careful [0]
>Why can't I have a file in two places at once on my filesystem? Why is it fundamentally hierarchical?
Soft/hard links, fam. Even Windows has them.
>Why can['t] I sort by tags and metadata?
You can in Linux, you just need to know a few commands first.
>Any web app can be zoomed. I can just hit command + and the text grows bigger. Everything inside the window automatically rescales to adapt. Why don't my native apps do that? Why can't I have one window big and another small? Or even scale them automatically as I move between the windows? All of these things are trivial to do with a compositing window manager, which has been commonplace for well over a decade.
Decent point IMO. There's a lot of native UI I have a hard time reading because it's so small. That said, I think bringing in the ability to zoom native widgets would bring in a lot of issues that HTML apps have.
>We should start by getting rid of things that don't work very well.
The author doesn't understand PCs. The entire point of these machines is backwards-compatibility, because we need backwards compatibility. I'm sitting next to a custom gaming PC and I have an actual serial port PCIe card because I need serial ports. Serial ports. In 2017. I'd be screwed if serial wasn't supported anymore.
I won't touch the rest of the article because I there's a lot I disagree with, but he seems to just want to completely reinvent the "modern OS" as just chromebooks.
That's what I was thinking. There's no reason a window manager can't have the concept of tabs, and display different programs as tabs on the same window.
I used to use Fluxbox, but I didn't know it was already capable of that. Pretty cool!
That's actually a really good point. However, I read that point more as having the new tab in the other application, as opposed to having a different app on each tab.
>Decent point IMO. There's a lot of native UI I have a hard time reading because it's so small. That said, I think bringing in the ability to zoom native widgets would bring in a lot of issues that HTML apps have.
It just seems like what the author describes could be easily implemented as a Compiz plugin. I mean, when it first came out, people went crazy with all sorts of plugins that were more fun than useful, but nicely showed off what the system was capable of.
>Why can I dock and undock tabs in my web browser or in my file manager, but I can't dock a tab between the two apps? There is no technical reason why this shouldn't be possible. Application windows are just bitmaps at the end of the day, but the OS guys haven't built it because it's not a priority.
I'm an idiot when it comes to operating systems (and sometimes even in general), but even I know why there are issues with that. You need a standardized form of IPC between the two apps, which wouldn't happen because both devs would be convinced their way is the best. On top of that, it's a great way to get an antitrust against you if you aren't careful [0]
>Why can't I have a file in two places at once on my filesystem? Why is it fundamentally hierarchical?
Soft/hard links, fam. Even Windows has them.
>Why can['t] I sort by tags and metadata?
You can in Linux, you just need to know a few commands first.
>Any web app can be zoomed. I can just hit command + and the text grows bigger. Everything inside the window automatically rescales to adapt. Why don't my native apps do that? Why can't I have one window big and another small? Or even scale them automatically as I move between the windows? All of these things are trivial to do with a compositing window manager, which has been commonplace for well over a decade.
Decent point IMO. There's a lot of native UI I have a hard time reading because it's so small. That said, I think bringing in the ability to zoom native widgets would bring in a lot of issues that HTML apps have.
>We should start by getting rid of things that don't work very well.
The author doesn't understand PCs. The entire point of these machines is backwards-compatibility, because we need backwards compatibility. I'm sitting next to a custom gaming PC and I have an actual serial port PCIe card because I need serial ports. Serial ports. In 2017. I'd be screwed if serial wasn't supported anymore.
I won't touch the rest of the article because I there's a lot I disagree with, but he seems to just want to completely reinvent the "modern OS" as just chromebooks.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....