FocOS

I've been working on some "What If" ideas about operating system design. My opinion on the status quo is that it is still very much frozen in the precepts of the Xerox-PARC paradigm. Apple perfected it, mostly, and Microsoft defined it for a generation Linux, oddly enough, has invested very little effort in the OS -- its design is at best a mirror of the MicrOSX world but is not in any way an improvement upon it.

Linux is not in my view, a revolutionary design as much as it is a supremely evolutionary design. It is a reinvention of Unix. This is not a criticism -- Unix is a fine and worthwhile interface, with a proud leacy of useful console tools, and Linux has proven itself amazingly stable and has grown at an amazing pace. What is revolutionary is the Open Source nature of its code. I do think its a darn shame that the Linux and OS community hasn't produced any truly revolutionary OSs to bring people who are not gearheads into the Linux environment.

I am not really able to fully spearhead this kind of thing, but I did want to put some ideas out there in the hopes of inspiring someone else to "do the hard work" to bring some fresh air to the OS environment and build a better frontend mousetrap for Linux. Or at least, create an object lesson on how something etablished can be improved by thinking functionally about something that everyone assumed was perfected a long time ago.