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Ideal OS: Rebooting the Desktop Operating System Experience

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Modern desktop operating systems are bloated, slow, and layered with legacy cruft that still functions only thanks to Moore's Law.  Innovation in desktop operating systems stopped about 15 years ago and the major players are unlikely to heavily invest in them again. We can and should start over from scratch, learning the lessons of the past.

-This idea was sourced from a blog post and used with permission from its original creator, Josh Marinacci -

  • OS
  • Software
  • Operating System
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Smart copy and paste (improvement)

When you copy in one window then shift to another, the computer knows that you just copied something. It can now use this knowledge to do something useful, like automatically shift the first window to the side, but still visible, and render the selected text in glowing green. This keeps the user's mind on the task at hand. When the user pastes into a new window we could show the green text actually leap from one window to another.

But why stop there. Let's make a clipboard that can hold more than one item at at time. We have gigs of RAM. Let's use it. When I copy something why do I have to remember what I copied before I paste it? The clipboard isn't actually visible anywhere. Let's fix that.

The clipboard should be visible on screen as some sort of a shelf that shows the recent items I've copied. I can visit three webpages, copy each url to the clipboard, then go back to my document and paste all three at once.

This clipboard viewer can let me scroll through my entire clipping history. I could search and filter it with tags. I could 'pin' my favorites for use later.

Classic macOS actually had an amazing tool built into it called [name], but it was dropped in the shift to OS X. We had the future decades ago! Let's bring it back.

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