Ideal OS: Rebooting the Desktop Operating System Experience

"Modern" Desktop Operating Systems are Bloated

Consider the Raspberry Pi. For 35 dollars I can buy an amazing computer with four CPU cores, each running over a gigahertz. It also has a 3d accelerator, a gig of RAM, and built in wifi & bluetooth & ethernet. For 35 bucks! And yet, for many of the tasks I want to do with it, this Raspberry Pi is no better than the 66 megahertz computer I used in college.

In fact, in some cases it's worse. It took tremendous effort to get 3D accelerated Doom to work inside of X windows in the mid 2000s, something that was trivial with mid-1990s Microsoft Windows.

Processing ran for the first time on a Raspberry Pi with hardware acceleration, just a couple of years ago. And it was possible only thanks to a completely custom X windows video driver. This driver is still experimental and unreleased, five years after the Raspberry Pi shipped.

Despite the problems of X-Windows, the Raspberry Pi has a surpisingly powerful GPU that can do all sorts of things, but only once we get X windows out of the way. Here's another example. Atom is one of the most popular editors today. Developers love it because it has oodles of plugins, but let us consider how it's written. Atom uses Electron, which is essentially an entire webbrowser married to a NodeJS runtime. That's two Javascript engines bundled up into a single app. Electron apps use browser drawing apis which delegate to native drawing apis, which then delegate to the GPU (if you're luck) for the actual drawing. So many layers.

For a long time Atom couldn't open a file larger than 2 megabytes because scrolling would be to slow. They solved it by writing the buffer implementation in C++, essentially removing one layer of indirection.

Even fairly simple apps are pretty complex these days. An email app is conceptually simple. It should just be a few database queries, a text editor, and a module that knows how to communicate with IMAP and SMTP servers. Yet writing a new email client is very difficult and consumes many megabytes on disk, so few people do it. And if you wanted to modify your email client, or at least the one above (Mail.app, the default client for Mac), there is no clean way to extend it. There are no plugins. There is no extension API. This is the result of many layers of cruft and bloat.

No Innovation

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.