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Comment by Hammershaft | Hacker News Reader

All of the other examples you gave are products constrained by physical reality with a small set of countable use-cases. I don't think computer operating systems are simply mature appliance-like products that have been optimized down their current design. I think there is a lot of potential that hasn't been realized because the very few players in the operating system space have been been hill-climbing towards a local maxima set by path dependence 40 years ago.

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To be precise, we're talking about "Desktop Computers" and not the more generic "information appliances".

For example, we're not remotely close to having a standardized "watch form-factor" appliance interface.

Physical reality is always a constraint. In this case, keyboard+display+speaker+mouse+arms-length-proximity+stationary. If you add/remove/alter _any_ of those 6 constraints, then there's plenty of room for innovation, but those constraints _define_ a desktop computer.

That's just the thing, desktops computers have always been in an important way the antithesis of a specialized appliance, a materialization of Turing's dream of the Universal Machine. It's only in recent years that this universality has come under threat, in the name of safety.

I wouldn't save the driver is "safety". It's happened that a few highly-specialized symbolic manipulation tasks now have enough market value such that they can demand highly specialized UX to optimize task performance.

One classic example is the "Bloomberg Box": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Terminal which has been around since the late '80s.

You can also see this from the reverse (analog -> digital) in the evolution of hospital patient life-sign monitors and the classic "6 pack" of gauges used in both aviation and automobiles.

I meant the universality (openness) of desktop computers comes under threat, as the "walled garden" model seeks to make the jump from mobile to desktop.

Ah yes, I agree. I run macOS as my daily driver, but otherwise barely skim the Apple ecosystem. Apple laptops were just the best hardware to run a Unix-ish (BSD) on.

Now with performant hypervisors, I just run a bunch of Linux VMs locally to minimize splash-zone and do cloud for performance computing.

I'll likely migrate fully to a Framework laptop next year, but I don't have time (atm) to do it. Ah, the good 'ole glory days of native Linux on Thinkpads.

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