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What would your ideal Operating System be like?
Carol Haynes:
And Opera being a bad model for extensions is also for me one of the things that it would make a perfect model for a perfect OS. Think about it. No matter how perfect an OS, if there are less than perfect programmers working on it than don't you risk breaking it now and again?
-Paul Keith (September 04, 2008, 04:57 PM)
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Is there such a beast as a "perfect programmer" - even in the Opera team.
Without extensibility an OS would be dead in the water - there is no way that anyone will use an OS that tries to do everything internally.
What about applications - aren't they in effect extensions to the operating system - do you want a self contained turn key system that can't have any additional apps added? That would be SO proprietary as to be next to useless.
Paul Keith:
And Opera being a bad model for extensions is also for me one of the things that it would make a perfect model for a perfect OS. Think about it. No matter how perfect an OS, if there are less than perfect programmers working on it than don't you risk breaking it now and again?
-Paul Keith (September 04, 2008, 04:57 PM)
--- End quote ---
Is there such a beast as a "perfect programmer" - even in the Opera team.
Without extensibility an OS would be dead in the water - there is no way that anyone will use an OS that tries to do everything internally.
What about applications - aren't they in effect extensions to the operating system - do you want a self contained turn key system that can't have any additional apps added? That would be SO proprietary as to be next to useless.
-Carol Haynes (September 04, 2008, 06:22 PM)
--- End quote ---
Exactly which is what would degrade a perfect OS fast. At the very least, an internally programmed but featureful, light and stable Operating System is no more different than a distro in the hands of a capable distro maker that knows exactly what they want and is that skilled enough to create an operating system that would suit himself and any other individual like him.
That isn't to say that an Opera-like Operating System should totally be without extensibility. That is just playing absolutes. Even Opera as a browser is extensible somewhat, it's just not on par with what many consider extensible in the open source world and yes applications could be considered external applications but it's rare that an external application made by your average programmer even with backing would automatically be superior to a close sourced program. Just look at OpenOffice and FatFox. One is the premier open source Office Suite and it's not even the lightest in it's category and the other is only a testament to open source being superior to closed source because people often think IE instead of Opera when they think closed source.
That isn't to say that my mind wouldn't change. After all, I am not a developer and cannot totally comprehend these things but I have been exposed to plugins before so it's not like I'm totally without basis.
Often times, many power users can easily forget that an operating system that's secure, has a stable lightweight Office Suite and an Opera browser like browser set up like Chrome by default that works on all sites would satisfy many casual users as a default skeleton for a great OS and last time something like that occured, that Operating System ended up transforming a company into a monopoly.
Remember for many users IE was preferred over the bloated Netscape and MS Office Suite was considered decent enough that even open source fans wouldn't be as enthusiastic to jump to OO compared to FF.
Yes, there will be things to deal with like games and mp3 players and all the other extras that require extensibility but look at Linux and see how extensibility didn't drove people to make or even port games on it despite it's supposed ease of use. More relevantly, look at how much a DE like Gnome or a designed to look like Windows PCLinux OS gained users fast even though many of those don't really know the true value of extensibility nor aren't used to how Linux works.
What an extensible OS would do is provide well...another extensible OS to many users but will it bring them closer to near perfection? Even if that OS was near perfect the influx on constant new applications and constant adjusting won't make them happy and therefore won't make it the perfect OS for them. Just a noisier one that they can keep tweaking and customizing to their needs and have headaches over when they break something and have to go to several places just to figure whether it's an OS bug or an application bug or they have to reformat and pray that they back up their data.
nontroppo:
So for my ideal OS, I want a well-defined database backend and a set of standard APIs for all, yes *all* these common tasks-tranglos
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OS X has core APIs and one of them is Core Data: http://developer.apple.com/macosx/coredata.html
Apple has tried to provide comprehensive APIs and deal with all the main requirements. Cocoa apps just plug into them, using core data to handle their storage and data handling requirements. There is also a system-wide spellchecker and dictionary available to all apps. Of course that doesn't stop e.g. Office from still using its own. Apps expose their data via Applescript (can use ruby/python etc if one prefers) and offer system services to other apps as a fundamental part of the OS environment. This makes everything more bridged together by default. Less data island and less redundancy. And that is what makes integrative apps like Quicksilver work so transparently - the APIs and enforced interoperability makes bridging easy.
In my ideal OS this path would be extended even further. I'd want Core Data like system to abstract further and allow more data mixing (obviously with an apps permission). All data stored in the system would be encouraged to have rich metadata. And the system indexer would have a unified entry point for apps that wanted to expose their data to the system as a whole. I could thus have an app (e.g. a Getting things done app) that exposed my to do information with my email app and allowed contextual linking between them.
urlwolf:
Nontroppo, I think what you are descibing -metadata shared among apps, full access to all data by all apps- is well underway in the semantic desktop crowd.
Mostly KDE, some gnome. Very interesting work done here, if a bit hard to find. I just came back from the international semantic web conference (ISWC2008) and there were lots of people there working on apps that do exactly what you descibe. Example, a file manager that knows which mail each file was an attachment of, even if you move it around.
You can google 'semantic desktop'. Let me know if you want specifics.
Dormouse:
I agree completely with all the comments wanting no installation of software. I prefer portable and it makes managing it much easier.
Fast startup and fast/safe shutdown and OS secure because it is locked down. I remember the ROM based OS in the Atari St for example starting and stopping very fast. Could always have a HDD layer above that to handle look and feel and customisation. Of course, having it on ROM does mean that it has to work right from the start :D
Organised/supported repositories. I find this aspect of Linux one of the most helpful, especially for the not very computer orientated peeps. For some reason, they seem to have no problem using these and researching the progs they want, but would never think of visiting download.com etc on Windows; I think there is a greater feeling of safety in these.
Facilitates multi-boot into other OSs with easy switching.
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