I may be showing my grey hair here, but that's emphatically not the point of an operating system.

falcor84 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I disagree with the grandparent too, but still would argue that an OS's goal is to allow its users to manage their applications and work processes rather than their computer.

It's a hard question to figure out what's the proper level of abstraction for this is. And while I strongly resisted it originally, I am becoming more open to the argument that many people don't need to "know" what a file is, to benefit from their computers - that as long as they can "save" their work, and "send" it from one app to another, they'd be able to get all the productivity that they are looking for.

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hdb2 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I had commented this above, but the OS should be flexible enough to do whatever the user needs it to do. "What it needs to do" is pretty broad, but I think that's the point.

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harvey9 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It should be possible to get creative and business work done on a computer while knowing almost nothing about an os but I use Windows at work and the situation with the file save dialogue in office is a farce. I can't imagine how confusing it is for someone who has no conception of what a file is.

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bonoboTP 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Files and folders are already a helpful metaphor taken from paper based office work. You have container folders and you can put different files (pieces of paper) into different folders. The thing thats a bit conceptually hard for regular people is the nesting, that folders can contain folders can contain folders. The real world has some nesting too, like putting folders in drawers but it's more limited in number of levels. This tends to be the thing that supposedly "more user friendly" apps remove and only allow two levels or so. Basically collections or lists, eg playlists. Or tags. But once you understand nesting, files and folders are quite intuitive.

Without the helpful abstraction of files and folders, all we'd have are bytes stored at various addresses or sectors of the hardware.

	▲	falcor84 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Without the helpful abstraction of files and folders, all we'd have are bytes stored at various addresses or sectors of the hardware. I agree with most everything else you said, but would slightly push back on that. I actually quite like the idea of non-hierarchical blob storage searchable via arbitrary indexed metadata, as well as the idea of content-addressable storage (e.g. with magnet links). While folders are an elegant abstraction, I really feel that we shouldn't be beholden to it.

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falcor84 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is actually an interesting example. To me it sounds like it actually should be less confusing to a person who has no preconceived notion of what a file should be, and only wants to save their work and reopen it later, not worried about what shape the saved object takes.

On that note, I remember how absolutely ecstatic I was when I first set up Sublime Text and discovered that unsaved editor tabs always reliably survive restarts; it essentially flips the script, whereby I've lost multiple saved files by accidentally deleting them, but I've never accidentally lost work in unsaved tabs, and I've never actually had any interest in figuring out where and how these tabs get persisted - it just works.

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mattkevan 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There’s a big difference between working on a computer and working with a computer.

The people doing the former use computers for ‘real work’. They are using a computer as an end in itself, care about operating systems and have strong opinions about systemd. The people doing the latter couldn’t give two shits about any of that and just want to get their presentation finished on time.

Problem is, both sets of people have to use the same machines. It’s also why software like GIMP will never become widely adopted in professional environments because it’s designed for a completely different userbase.