I'd like to see an OS where "your profile" is entirely in the cloud and every device you register becomes just another node. Your laptop, phone, desktop, smart watch, and homeserver are all just nodes with different capabilities. Some have touchscreens, some have GPUs, some have lots of memory, some are always-on, others are ephemeral.
I'd like to play a game on my phone but have my desktop's GPU render frames for me like Stadia.
I want my server to pick the next song in the playlist on my phone to match the tempo of the heart rate it hears from my watch.
I'd like to type "make -j" and have it transparently use every core ...on every device I own.
These things can be done today with ad-hoc hacks, but an OS designed around these ideas would mean you could write lots of programs very differently.
Completely agree. I want a computing model I called PAO, where applications are singular and available across all of your devices. If you're interested in a read: https://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao
I'm curious what kind of use case you have in mind for this OS you're envisioning. I'll admit I can't really figure out either what you're trying to describe.
This is something I've wondered quite a bit also.
ChromeOS already has this feature -- it's the idea of the device simply acting as a terminal, with all user data stored in the cloud.
Also, I'm a bit afraid implementing full-featured multiple user sessions (similar to a desktop OS) would lead to a lot more bloat.
I want to see a power user OS. Something designed for humans who need to analyze huge amounts of data in arbitrary ways. Something that knows how to work with cloud resources to profile new data sources, simplifying the whole ETL challenge. With great APIs at the program level, so I can always pull datasets between apps, use the best app for the job, and automate everything I need to do twice.
It could technically fit any of those cases depending on the implementation, but the simplest path is probably building an application that disguises itself as an operating system. It could even be sandboxed to some degree and still probably suit most needs.
I think there would definitely be a market for something like that (I want this USB stick for instance), but I don't think operating systems as a whole are going in that way.
Even with the rise of the Cloud, there are a lot of things that for various reasons are best handled by at least a fat client if not a full-blown PC with its own OS and processing power.
This idea is cool, but I already have a seamless experience of moving to different devices through my day and having access to everything I need.
It is stuff like O365, Github, OneDrive, AWS etc that enable that. No plugging in, no reconfiguring devices. Moving between windows 11, android and debian everything I want is right there.
I can't see the advantage, yet, of trying to consoldate down to one device.
That's one hell of a smart idea if they can pull it off. As an OS, it can run on a VM or dedicated hardware, which gives us users the greatest flexibility. Well played!
Yes, it would be very useful to have a single OS image that could scale its user interface and capabilities to the hardware it finds attached at any given moment.
I was thinking of the Ubuntu desktop. Each desktop utility could be its own virtual machine, and it wouldn't be so far removed from what already happens with Electron.
So what exactly would this look like? I guess I don't see what's missing from currently available options (e.g. Linuxes, BSDs, etc. with all their ecosystems) that, if it were available, would change behavior at scale and would flip the situation around.
I'd like to play a game on my phone but have my desktop's GPU render frames for me like Stadia.
I want my server to pick the next song in the playlist on my phone to match the tempo of the heart rate it hears from my watch.
I'd like to type "make -j" and have it transparently use every core ...on every device I own.
These things can be done today with ad-hoc hacks, but an OS designed around these ideas would mean you could write lots of programs very differently.
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