Ideal OS: Modern Desktop Operating Systems Are Bloated, Slow, and Layered With Legacy Cruft

In 2017, Josh Marinacci published a blog article whose basic idea I really like: Ideal OS: Rebooting the Desktop Operating System Experience.

I want to mention a few quotes to motivate you to read it on your own. The first part may be somewhat dated as he is using 2017 computer issues to prove his point. You need to "translate" that section into nowadays world. There are plenty of examples that go in the same direction as the article.

TL;DR: By the end of this essay I hope to convince you of the following facts. First, that modern desktop operating systems are anything but. They are bloated, slow, and layered with legacy cruft/ that still functions only thanks to Moore's Law. Second, that innovation in desktop operating systems stopped about 15 years ago and the major players are unlikely to heavily invest in them again. And finally, I hope to convince you that we can and should start over from scratch, learning the lessons of the past.

Innovation in desktop operating systems is essentially dead. One could argue that it ended sometime in the mid-90s, or even in the 80s with the release of the Mac, but clearly all progress stopped after the smartphone revolution.

Why can't I have a file in two places at once on my filesystem? Why is it fundamentally hierarchical? Why can I sort by tags and metadata?

Essentially every application on my computer is a silo. Each application has its own part of the filesystem, its own config system, and its own preferences, database, file formats and search algorithms. Even its own set of key bindings. This is an incredible amount of duplicated effort.
More importantly, the lack of communication between applications makes it very difficult to get them to coordinate. The founding principle of Unix was small tools that work together, but X Windows doesn't enable that at all.

I process orders of magnitude more data from more locations than I did only 20 years ago, much less 40 years ago when these concepts were invented. The desktop metaphor just doesn't scale to today's tasks. I need a computer to help me do modern work.

So now we come to the speculative part. Suppose we actually had the resources, and had a way to address (or ignore) backwards compatibility. Suppose we actually built something to redesign the desktop around modern work practices. How would we do it?

... and then he continues with his suggestion on how to start a brand new computing environment from scratch.

Interlude: Funny enough, he is anticipating Microsoft Recall. Although Microsoft received a huge shitstorm for this feature announcement and its current bad implementation, I agree that the basic functionality would be really cool to have. The critical part is that this should never be accessible by any third party, only for the person whose data gets processed.

A totally agree to the basic idea. I also wrote about it in multiple articles like:

• The Desktop Metaphor: Once Awesome, Now Hindrance
  • Yes, the desktop metaphor should be removed from our digital world.
• We Need to Decentralize and Re-Invent Our Computer Systems
• Microsoft as Hardware Innovation Leader and: HW Is More Innovative Than SW

In my article Evolutional Steps of Computer Systems I promoted the idea to strive for "Information-Centric Systems" and "Application-Less Systems". This would really push our user experience forward and maybe liberate us from the UX dictatorship of mega corporations that can't and will never change most of the usage patterns that are the cause of our problems here.

As a quick workaround, I can recommend using tools like GNU Emacs and of course Org-mode. If you really do embrace its philosophy, you don't need to worry about other applications for word processing, spreadsheet, drawing, todo and project mangement, contact management, blogging platforms, knowledge base, reference libraries, and so forth. You habe everything in one common place, you don't need to search across multiple silos that aren't connected to each other. I'm using that for over a decade and I'll never switch back to the chaos I had to use before and which the vast majority of people seems to be happy with.

Although Org-mode is delivering most things that Josh wants to have, it is still just a workaround until we have computing environments that extend that idea to all digital workflows.

Josh did not only write blog articles. He also started to implement his new system he called "Ideal OS".

Read one of his latest updates so far on that on Ideal OS Mark 6. I don't think that he is investing much work here because Ideal OS is not even listed on his project page.

I, personally, do not think that writing a completely new computing concept can be done by any single person. This needs much more people, lots of discussions on the general concept and a rock-solid tech basis for generations to come. Not that easy.

Some people think that Plan 9, Oberon or one of its variants have the potential to provide such a tech basis. Either way, I don't see much ressources here. So we need to further stick with the badly designed operating systems we have for now.