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On top of that, most hardware and protocol implementations are either secret and under NDA or free and open but lacking a full implementation to begin with.

The post contains many idealistic proposals, but most of them boil down to lawyer stuff and money, not technical problems. You can't have nice GPU access because GPU's are secret. You can't have things work together because nobody wants to share their secret sauce. Everyone is trying to 'be the best' and get an edge on the rest, but in a way that nobody really profits from it from a technical standpoint.

Aside from the shit-ton of reverse-engineering and some cleanroom design, there is very little that can be done to improve this, and no company is going to help, and thus no big pile of resources is coming to save the day.

This does of course not only go for GPU's, but CPU's and their BSP's and secret management controllers as well, as the dozen or so secret binary blobs you need to get all the hardware to work at all.

Fixing this from the ground up, i.e. for x86, would mean something like getting coreboot working on the recent generations of CPU's, and that's not happening at the moment due to lack of information and secret code signing keys needed to actually get a system to work.

Why people have such hope for recent efforts in specifying a open CPU ISA.

The ISA is not important. The economics of open hardware is, and that's a much harder problem.

Probably a point in the middle would be the right compromise, most people think its binary (its closed hardware or its free+open) but I don't; I think there should be a hardware company (with all the stack: GPU + CPU + kernel) that goes the same way Epic went with Unreal (their game engine); meaning you can use their hardware for free and the specs are public but if your company evers get more than 50K in profits you have to pay them 20% of your profits; or something like that.

> The ISA is not important. The economics of open hardware is, and that's a much harder problem.

Maybe. The fact that Moore's Law finally broke may paradoxically help that.

When you can simply get 2x the (cost, performance, features) simply by doing nothing, there is no incentive to optimize anything.

Now that you can't simply "do nothing", people will start looking at alternatives.

Yesss I've been waiting for this moment for nearly two decades haha :)

And it's definitely possible, just look at the C64 and Amiga demoscene. Those machines haven't evolved for ages, but they've been making them do one (thought to be) "impossible" thing after another for a very long time after the platforms were essentially considered dead. I've seen things at demoparties around 2000 where C64 demos showed stuff that was thought to be impossible to do on these machines (or so I was told, I'm not an expert on the C64's capabilities, but the thing runs in the single megahertzes and doesn't have a divide instruction, so yeah). One I remember had a part with a veeery low resolution realtime raytracer, about 10fps I think, the scene consisting of just a plane and a sphere (IIRC) ... but it was done on a C64.

I wonder how long it will take for PCs though. Moore's Law broke already a few years ago didn't it? But it's not really happening, so far. Or maybe it is. I haven't been keeping up with what's happening in the PC demoscene lately. They used to be way ahead of the curve compared to PC videogames, this changed somewhere in the 200Xs, probably because around that time videogames started getting Hollywood-size budgets.

> You can't have things work together because nobody wants to share their secret sauce. Everyone is trying to 'be the best' and get an edge on the rest, but in a way that nobody really profits from it from a technical standpoint.

I feel like enterprise customers could provide some demand for IdealOS for this reason. BigCorps have lots of data and application silos, as well as lots of knowledge workers who are expected to synthesize all that data. There are a lot of smart people who are power users but not devs. (i.e., macro jockies). Something like IdealOS could really increase productivity in these places.

Of course you have to deal with all the usual enterprise headaches, mostly security and backwards compatibility. But then they'd pay a premium.

If the world worked like this, then BigCorps would probably demand easy to use, intuitive payroll and ERP systems first.

But exhibit A: SAP.

I've been suggesting that one way into an enterprise environment is to _give the hardware away_.

Make a device with enough RAM, Bluetooth for a mouse, USB ports, and one or two HDMI ports. A stick computer might be a good starting point.

Then build your OS for that device. Enable cloud management, integrate with Active Directory, focus on an amazing out of the box web browser experience and expand with an app store for well-thought-out, well designed open and commercial apps.

Now give ten to every company with a DUNS number.

Sell more with a subscription including more advanced management and enable pushing modified Windows group policies to them.

Make it good enough for a casual knowledge worker to use .

"This does of course not only go for GPU's, but CPU's and their BSP's and secret management controllers as well, as the dozen or so secret binary blobs you need to get all the hardware to work at all."

My first thought was actually "what about data formats?" These days, most data formats are at least nominally open, but you still need to write code to work with those formats, and most of the existing code is still in C or C++ libraries. The IdealOS will fail instantly as soon as a user receives a DOCX or XLSX file and it displays the document wrong. It can't just launch LibreOffice and use that. Even LibreOffice can't always parse random MS Office documents correctly, and LO represents decades of coder-years.

Well they could probably come up with some solution perhaps using a virtual LibreOffice to import it or whatnot. We've known for ages that those formats aren't particularly "ideal" and we should be starting letting them go, regardless of dreaming about a hypothetical OS or not.

I mean, you could also probably come up with some solution to have a guest over who brings their pet cow without doing too much damage to your nicely decorated apartment. Doesn't mean that's an ideal situation, and it most definitely is no reason to not dream about living somewhere nicer than a stable, and what that would look like to you.

The latter part, about dreaming how NICE your house could look like if you did not have to accommodate guests with cows barging into your living room all the time. That is what the article is actually about, he's pretty clear about his awareness that technical possibility is very different from the availability of a realistic road to transition from where we are now to the possibilities he sketches.

It's also a very important matter of combating learned helplessness. If you dismiss dreaming about an IdealOS beforehand because there's no way (that you can see now) to get there from where desktop OS's are today, then you most assuredly will miss the opportunity to attain even some of these improvements, were they to come within reach through some circumstance in the future.

Also, I remember programming on a 386. And on the one hand it amazes me that the thing in my pocket today is so much more powerful than that old machine, let alone my current desktop. And on the other hand, it infuriates me that some tasks on my desktop today are quite slow when really they have no right to be, and some of these tasks are even things that my 386 used to have no problems with whatsoever (but then, TPX was a ridiculously fast compiler, a true gem).

We should not let that slip out of sight, demand better and keep dreaming.

I guess that the article did annoy me. Partly because I remember GNUStep, Longhorn, OLPC etc. etc. which attempted some of these things, and we already know why those projects failed completely, and partly because I can now see the desktop slowly improving month-by-month on the Linux+GNOME stack. Yes, it's painfully slow and gradual, but it's sustainable progress: Wayland compositors, GNOME, Flatpak, and Atomic Workstation are actual shipping code that will only get better and more heavily used over time.

I think the author wants a bunch of really specific personal workflow ideas/concepts they have to be the standard, which is typically what these rants are. Such rant posts are always interesting to me as I do question my own workflow just to see if there are good ideas I'm missing out on, but a lot of the author's ideas just don't strike me as all that important in most cases, and in some of the complaints, I'm not sure what the complaint is.

Their complaint on the filesystem, for example, falls flat for me, but partially because I think I don't understand what they want or how BeOS did it. Maybe the author has a special meaning for "...sort by tags and metadata", but this looks to be baked right into Finder at the moment; I can add in a bunch of columns to sort by, tag my items with custom tags (and search said tags), add comments, and so on. Spotlight also has rendered a lot of organization moot as you just punch in a few bits of something about what you're looking for (tags, text within the document, document name, file type, date modified by, etc.) and you'll find it. I don't know exactly what is missing from modern OSes (Windows search isn't too bad either) that the author isn't contented with.

The idea of multiple forms of interaction with the computer are okay, but quite frankly it starts to get into an eerie situation for me where I'd rather have to take a lot of steps to set up such monitoring as opposed to it being baked into the OS. I realize that I'm squarely in luddite territory given the popularity of Home Assistants (Echo, Apple Homekit, Google Home), but to me these seem like very intentional choices on the part of a customer; you have to go out of your way to get the hardware for it and disabling it is as simple as pulling the plug. Look at the non-sense we're having to deal with in regards to Windows Telemetry - to me this is what happens when such items get baked into the OS instead of being an additional application; you end up with a function you no longer can control, and for no other reason than to satisfy the complaint of "I have to download something? No thank you!"

I could go on, but the author's rant just doesn't seem consistent and instead seems to just want some small features that they liked from older OSes to be returned to modern OSes. There is a huge issue with bloat and cruft and some real legacy stuff in Windows and macOS, and desktop OSes aren't getting the attention they should be, but these suggestions aren't what desktop OSes are missing or what they need.

It might be worth nothing that one of BeFS's authors, Dominic Giampaolo, is currently working on APFS (and previously on Spotlight.)

A fascinating piece of trivia I was not aware of. To me it seems reasonable that instead of trying to reinvent the whole shebang that instead you get these incremental changes over time that just make an OS really really good.

OS X too a lot of getting used to for me as a kid, as I had an old mac clone and an iMac with 10.1 side by side in my living room, and I loved my little mac clone. OS X didn't immediately win me over because I was just too used to OS 9 and had everything I needed on my offline mac clone. But I distinctly remember Spotlight being what really sold me on OS X because from the get-go it worked basically as intended, and man was it magnificent. If the author of Spotlight is on APFS, I have a lot of faith in it then.

Ars Technica did a retrospective on the BeOS filesystem[1] which may help explain things. The tl;dr of it is that the filesystem is the canonical database that all applications can use and query without any special domain specific knowledge. I'm not up to date with how MacOS works so it's possible they've added a layer on top of the filesystem which works similarly. However, I do know that Windows is nowhere near that level, mainly because it's encouraged for metadata to be stored in file specific ways.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/06/the-b...

On the Mac, the metadata is stored in a file (inside /.Spotlight-V100) rather than inside the filesystem (a la BeOS File System). An application can provide Spotlight Importer that can extract metadata from a file during index (this is why mdimport is taking a lot of CPU time).

AFAIK, this approach is contrary to the BeOS approach, where application write the metadata directly. Spotlight's approach do have few benefits, though, such as able to provide metadata for files in network drives, or for removable disks that might not be using filesystem that supports metadata.

No, that's only part of the story. Early on, they were using resource forks for data but metadata as well. Then they moved to filesystem attributes and those just grew. You can have tags in there, as well as text, icons, settings etc. It's pretty standardized, but on top of that, you can use Spotlight metadata too, both in the EA as well ans the V100 DB.

Using a structure other than the file to store information about the file seems like a big problem (like the iTunes example Josh used). It's inherently not portable. Even if the OS took extra steps to copy the additional data along with the file, that still replies on the target OS to recognize the additional file(s), and incorporate it into whatever search functionality it has. Supporting the tags or metadata in the file simplifies things quite a bit.

>I think the author wants a bunch of really specific personal workflow ideas/concepts they have to be the standard, which is typically what these rants are.

This one in particular:

>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?

I mean, you can. It's called the taskbar.

Yeah gnu tried and not to be too harsh failed with mach and hurd. They designed an OS according to their principles and nobody came to the party. Heck, mach uses Linux device drivers which tells you how much effort volunteers are willing to put into each project.

I don't think we'll see a change from Linux and Windows (edit: and IOS) until there's another compelling reason to switch; some feature that can't or won't be available in the other two operating systems and their surrounding ecosystems of software.

When was the last time we really had a "Visicalc sold more Apples than Apples sold Visicalc" moment? I can't think of one after Linux wafflestomped all the propietary hardware and os unix vendors, or to give Apple their due, when they released the iPhone.

Edit: duh, of course cloud taking over for bespoke hardware and software defined storage pushing out EMC and the like are two recent examples of industry game changers, but on the other hand both still rely primarily on Linux so my assertion about operating systems still stands.

> 4 guys coding in the dark on the bare metal just can't build an OS anymore, it won't have GPU access, it won't have a solid TCP/IP stack, it won't have good USB support, or caching, or a dependable file system.

Well, they wouldn't need to any more. They can adopt drivers from Linux or any other free operating systems. The inner work of a driver might be arcane, the interface to an operating system is generally well defined. Adopting a existing driver is definitely doable.