Ideal OS: Rebooting the Desktop Operating System Experience

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.

Mac OS

Mac OS X was once a shining beacon of new features, with every release showing profound progress and invention. Quartz 2D! Expose! System wide device syncing! Widgets! Today, however Apple puts little effort into their desktop operating system besides changing the theme every now and then and increasing hooks to their mobile devices.

Apple's newest version of Mac OS X (now renamed macOS in honor of where they were two decades ago) is called High Sierra. What are banner features that we are eagerly awaiting this fall? A new filesystem and a new video encoding format. Really, that's it? Oh, and they added editing to Photos, which was already there in iPhotos but removed during the upgrade and they will block autoplay videos now in Safari.

Apple is the most valuable company in the world and this is the best they can do? Desktop UX just isn't a priority for them.

Microsoft Windows

On the Windows side there has been a flurry of activity as Microsoft tried to reinvent the desktop as a touch operating system for tablets and phones. This was a disaster that they are still recovering from. In the process of this shift they didn't add any features that actually helped desktop users, though they did spend an absurd amount of money creating a custom background image.

Instead of improving the desktop UX they focused on adding new application models with more and more layers on top of the old code. Incidentally, Windows can still run applications from the early 90s.

CMD.exe, the terminal program which essentially still lets you run DOS apps was only replaced in 2016. And the biggest new feature of the latest Windows 10 release? They added a Linux subsystem. More layers piled on top.

X Windows

X Windows has improved even less than the other two desktop OSes. In fact, it's the very model of non-change. People were complaining about it in the early 90s. I'm glad that I can reskin my GUI toolkit, but how about a system wide clipboard that holds more than one item at a time? That hasn't changed since the 80s!

X added compositing window managers in the mid-2000s, but due to legacy issues it can't be used for anything beyond sliding your windows around.

Work Stations?

Fundamentally desktop operating systems became easier to use as they were adopted by the mass market; then the mass market moved to smartphones and all interest in improving the desktop interface stopped.

I can't blame Apple and Microsoft (and now Google) for this. 3 billion smartphones replaced every two years is a far bigger market than a few hundred million desktops and laptops replaced every five.

I think we need to take back the desktop operating system experience. We used to call these things workstations. If the desktop is freed from being the OS for the masses, then it can go back to being an OS for work.