Ask HN: Are we done at desktop OS innovation?

8 points·imd23··3 comments

I believe at least for pros OS innovation has been really poor. I can't imagine using anything else besides Mac and that feels bad. It's 2014, Where's the NEXT OS revolution?

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Not even close. One of the major innovations missing from OS evolution is a cloud connected OS. ChromeOS gives you a bit of a glimpse at this but in reality ChromeOS really isn't much of an OS when you think of something more robust like OS X. But if you can imagine a cloud driven OS where you simply log in (like you would, say, gmail) and your entire OS follows you no matter where you go. This is also a concept similar to network accounts Universities have for students (although in much more limited capacity) and I believe one of the core influences behind Dropbox.

I am fairly certain there are way more than just this but ultimately this is one of the things I'd like to see happen.

Innovation will never be done. Some kid somewhere will find a new way of doing things. Anyways, for programmers, I would think something like this. Imagine you are coding/executing on command line and you repeatedly get an GCC error "Cannot use Non-POD objects in ....". Sometimes, I break my head over these kind of non-obvious errors. I want the command line/terminal to tell me the solution immediately instead of me needing to go to stackoverflow.

I'd like to think that part of it will have to do with voice command. I'd like to be able to command my laptop/desktop to do anything from basic tasks (schedule reminders, launch apps) to complex and customizable tasks (create new ruby model, connect to distant ssh server, etc.), all of that by just clicking a button and talking for 1 sec.

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