I appreciate the article for its coverage of many OS (including BeOS, wow, I should try that). What about package management though? Package management really defines the way you live under your flavor of linux, and there is a lot of room for improvement in current package managers (like decentralizing them, for example).
Also:
> I know I said we would get rid of the commandline before, but I take that back. I really like the commandline as an interface sometimes, it's the pure text nature that bothers me. Instead of chaining CLI apps together with text streams we need something richer [...]
I can't agree with that, it is the plain text nature of the command line that makes it so useful and simple once you know a basic set of commands (ls,cd,find,sed,grep + whatever your specific task needs). Plain text is easy to understand and manipulate to perform whatever task you need to do. The moment you learn to chain commands and save them to a script for future use, the sky is the limit. I do agree with using voice to chain commands, but I would not complain about the plain text nature and try to bring buttons or other forms of unneeded complexity to command-line.
Also:
> I know I said we would get rid of the commandline before, but I take that back. I really like the commandline as an interface sometimes, it's the pure text nature that bothers me. Instead of chaining CLI apps together with text streams we need something richer [...]
I can't agree with that, it is the plain text nature of the command line that makes it so useful and simple once you know a basic set of commands (ls,cd,find,sed,grep + whatever your specific task needs). Plain text is easy to understand and manipulate to perform whatever task you need to do. The moment you learn to chain commands and save them to a script for future use, the sky is the limit. I do agree with using voice to chain commands, but I would not complain about the plain text nature and try to bring buttons or other forms of unneeded complexity to command-line.