> OSes are the one area where reinventing the wheel leads to a lot of innovation

To me, it seems like the opposite is true. Operating systems feel like a solved problem. What are some of the big innovations of recent times?

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wraptile 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Operating systems feel like a solved problem

Even desktop environment is not solved. I'm typing this from a relatively new metod of displaying windows - a scrolling window manager (e.g. Karousel [1] for KDE). It just piles new windows to the right and it infinitely scrolls horizontally. This seems like a minor feature but changes how you use the desktop entirely and required a lot of new features at operating system level to enable this. I wouldn't go back to a desktop without this.

The immutable systems like NixOS [2] have been an absolute game changer as well. Some parts are harder but having an ability to always roll back and the safety of immutability really make your professional environment so much easier to maintain and understand. No more secrets, not more "I set something for one project at system level and now years later I forgot and now something doesn't work".

I've been on linux desktop exclusively for almost 15 years now and it has never been as much fun as it is today!

1 - https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel

2 - https://nixos.org/

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depressedpanda 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Nifty.

I've long wanted a scrollable/zoomable desktop, with a minimap that shows the overall layout. Think the UI of an RTS game, where instead of units you move around and resize windows. This seems like something in that direction, at least.

How does Karousel work with full screen applications, e.g., games?

	▲	wraptile 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Karousel knows when application wants to be fullscreen and allows it to take the screen. If you use hotkey for "move focus to left/right window" you can even exit fullscreen to see other programs. You can also force any program to fullscreen with a key. This is a pretty good workflow as you can fullscreen something and still keep the layout, just not visibly.

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amelius 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Am I the only one who thinks that DBus and XDG are causing a lot of problems?

I would love to see a complete overhaul of those.

In my opinion, if I type "xeyes" and it works (the app shows on my screen), then I should be able to start any other X11 application. However, gnome-terminal behaves differently. I don't know why precisely, but using dbus-launch sometimes works. It is a very annoying issue. A modern Linux desktop system feels like it's microservices connected by duct-tape, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.

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positron26 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

On the DE, we just struggle with polish. This is paradoxically both an issue of not enough fruitful innovation and not enough maturity of good innovations that happen and take forever to be adopted.

As far as the actual OS, the new sheaves and barns thing in Linux is neat. We need innovation in RAM compression and swapping to handle bursty desktop memory needs better.

The main problem, and the one I'm trying to solve, is that as a software engineer, you have little incentive to make something that millions of people will use on the Linux desktop unless you have some other downstream monetization plan. You will have tons of users who have questions, not code contributions. To enable users to better organize into their own support structures and to make non-code contributions, I'm building PrizeForge.