The future of operating systems in an Internet world

Topic: The Future of Operating Systems in an Internet World (edited)

I'm the one who pitched this topic in the first place, so here's what I was thinking at the time I wrote it

10:07

Basically: the web gets a lot of crap around here, for good reasons, but the interesting thing about it to me is that the ease of distribution and the remarkable cross-platform support seem to outweigh the downsides of the crappy tech stack for nearly everyone.

10:07

At the same time, we have all kinds of discussions here about the future of computing, and part of that is broadly on the "operating system" side of things

10:08

and I often feel like those OS brainstorms don't really take the internet into account

10:08

The web has dramatically changed how software is developed and distributed, and I think any future operating system needs to consider how it could achieve some of the same benefits

I've been looking into a lot of the web technologies, having been not very interested until about 5 months ago, the ease of distribution is definitely readily apparent. One of the nicest things about some of the technologies coming to maturity in this case is WebAssembly which I know both you and Bill have been messing with a lot. Which in practice is a fantasy CPU on the computer of anyone who has a browser on their machine

10:10

Which is everyone.

WASM is really just a small part of it

Of the entire web ecosystem?

10:10

(Just to clarify)

I think there's a much larger conversation to be had about what "programs" look like in the context of the web

Gotcha

WASM provides an execution environment, but there's much more to what we expect from an operating system

I don't know when bmp will show, but this has been the center of a lot of discussion around how a user experience is designed in a world chock full of internet.

10:12

What's your thesis?

I didn't prep it as much as I should have

10:13

A starting place may be the fact that browsers have already become strange approximations of operating systems

10:13

Browsers now are virtual machines, window managers, persistent storage APIs, and graphics drivers

10:14

but they look very different from traditional OSes, and subject "programs" to much stronger restrictions (edited)

10:14

I think traditional operating systems provide a model for an "offline" OS, and browsers provide a model for a strictly "online" OS

A given website is a software package that you download and run, and it needs to be able to be streamed in as such?

I'm curious if there is some kind of middle ground; a hybrid approach that gives you rich control over local data while still allowing easy distribution of software (and extra protections with it?)

10:15

I know Ryan mentioned the idea of "temporary software" at one point

10:16

as something in that direction

I think that's kinda where the biggest idea of a "online" is comes in, the systems offer different expectations to how the software is structured.

I could get deeper into the weeds, but I want to hear other people's initial thoughts about the issue before I go any further (edited)

Hello everyone. Regarding OSes, what do people use the OS for effectively? Some way to load programs, access to the file system, communicating to hardware and external things, threads, memory allocation, etc. The OS is not much different to the kernel to what people actually want from it. (This is ignoring the GUI/TUI)