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Why?

Caveats

Most if not all pages are just rough notes, and these pages as a whole are far from complete. More notes will be added in time, eventually, maybe.

If, from reading these notes, you conclude that I am off my rocker, you won’t be the first, and you may even be right.

No doubt there are a dozen and one reasons why none of this would ever work, but perhaps somewhere deep down there is a tiny fragment that could be used for something.

Why?

I don’t know.

Thus far in life, I have used a wider variety of computer operating systems than the average person, including:

Once you’ve spent a considerable amount of time around two more different operating systems, you’re ejected from your comfortable position of assuming that the way that one operating system does things is the correct way or the only way. With this increase in knowledge comes a corresponding reduction of peace of mind: you start seeing all the flaws and limitations of operating systems that the respective vendors persistently ignore or fail to resolve with the passing decades.

Why can’t Windows communicate with processes the way Mac OS and Linux can? Why can’t macOS create new files from a New menu? Why can’t the New menu in Windows use the template system of NewCM in classic Mac OS? Why do Windows applications have to be complete web browsers in their own right just to get the dynamic window layout in Linux widget sets? The list is all but endless. In the Windows world, the exceptional arrogance of developers causes a lot of the woes. Right-drag on a window’s title bar—as implemented in RISC OS to move a window without raising it—can never work as so many developers insist on drawing fake title bars.

One could conclude that—with sufficient experience of a variety of different systems—it should be possible to distil all the good ideas found across the computer industry into something better than all the isolated offerings currently on the market. Group Policy for example is a catastrophe. In contrast, F-Secure Policy Manager (FSPM) offers a hierarchical, MIB-based policy and configuration system with settings-level lockout (policy control versus default behaviour). FSPM does not, however, support multiple inheritance or any other ability to present policies at multiple positions in the hierarchy: there is a general tendency in IT to disregard the need for matrix configuration (e.g. orthogonal device type and location/customer axes).

Microsoft Windows is comically abysmal at being unable to do the one thing its name indicates it should: manage windows. It is also overcomplicated beyond comprehension (far too many incohesive subsystems), fragile and frequently poorly-implemented. Linux feels needlessly trapped in the past; putting aside the chaos of competing distributions, you now have the overcomplexity of a Windows system overlaid onto archaic technology. Apple and Acorn both had some very interesting ideas and classic Mac OS had some impressive system engineering, but both Mac OS (pre-X) and RISC OS were crippled by other shortcomings: RISC OS by exceptional clumsiness, and Mac OS by its infamous instability. (It’s also a reasonable argument that Mac OS needed a command line, although there were in fact console interfaces for Mac OS.)

Yet, had Apple succeeded in introducing memory protection, pre-emptive multitasking and API safeguards to Mac OS 9, it would have still been exactly the same system to the end user, just smooth and reliable. Plenty more improvements were possible without a single compromise to the end user experience, such as proper anti-aliasing. Mac OS X was not a net improvement, but rather an exchange: a confusing, inconsistent and over-wrought system foisted on Mac users as the only way to rid the system of crashes.

At this point in time, there is no hope for the future. It’s not that creating a new operating system is impossible: SerenityOS is a clear demonstration that it can be done. What is not possible now is to achieve dominance in the desktop operating system space in a world increasingly desperate to get rid of desktop computer systems. After all, who wants to work on a 27″ desktop display when you can squint at the whole world on your phone.

Rather, these pages just represent a mental dump that nobody is going to read, and from which nothing will ever develop.