"TECH THINGS WE NEEDED YESTERDAY"
A list of software and hardware that could feasibly exist in our current socioeconomic reality, but somehow just don't.
ON GENERAL UX/USABILITY
DEVELOPMENT-CENTRIC DESKTOP ENVIRONMENTS
"for fuck’s sake can our software carpenters finally insist that everyone should learn to use a god damn hammer"
- zzt at mas.to, about LLM users who casually reveal that they don't know how to use text editors
https://mas.to/@zzt/116810816016522694
I'm not really a programmer: but ever since I started dabbling in ZDoom modding I've staunchly believed that every computer user should know the basics of scripting and software development.
I think that a desktop environments that includes "view source code" and "open in disassembler"-buttons on every application window and launcher icon could be incredibly helpful to this end: in terms of navigability.
This would clearly be most practical on systems where most of the applications are written in interpreted languages, but could easily be brought to systems where compiling software from source is a first-class feature (i.e Gentoo, Guix, BSD).
HELPER MENU FOR THE TERMINAL
"you can only have an interest in finding out if the resources are there, to tell you that there's something to find out"
- munin at infosec exchange, in the thread that put me on track to writing this article
https://infosec.exchange/@munin/116771889195720188
A command line shell with a context menu where you can find and paste every available command or application, featuring icons and descriptions for all of them.
Not sure if this should be implemented by the terminal emulator or the shell itself.
This would make the command line tools more discoverable, bringing the terminal to par with the searchable program launchers that bascially every respectable desktop environment ships with.
tusharhero at mathstodon.xyz mentioned Shell Mode from Emacs, a feature that I still haven't looked into.
ON PORTABLE COMPUTING
Considering that the Pentium M was the first laptop CPU to become kinda popular as a desktop/Home Theatre PC chip and released at the dawn of the mini-ITX formfactor, I’m surprised that the DIY PC industry didn’t make components for DIY laptops.
Would’ve spared us the reign of Framework’s flaky expensive junk.
It'd also be interesting if someone designed a smartphone or 7 inch tablet that used a SATA/mSATA SSD as its primary form of storage.
These drives seem to be a fair bit cheaper and more reliable than high-speed high-capacity SD cards, so I can see certain types of indie filmmakers absolutely falling in love with them.
If it had a physical keyboard that can be swapped for a gamepad it’d probably be the greatest phone of all time.
As for mobile operating systems: I think Firefox OS could've found a niche foothold if it was aimed at people who wish to make their own websites or develop programs on the move, and was geared towards phones with physical keyboards (or tablets, for that matter).
A desktop or laptop version could be interesting for people who like the idea of running the same OS on all of their devices: even if sticking with the decision to exclusively support HTML5 apps would still have hampered it’s adoption.
SOFTWARE DISTRIBUTION
It'd be neat to have a source-based package manager for Windoze and MacOS: to promote the advantages of building software from source.
(this one probably already exists in some form)
I guess it'd also be neat to have a clone of Itch.io that only serves FOSS videogames.
I also think it'd be incredible if more FOSS videogames shipped level editors.
It's kinda perverse that Trackmania (a series where the first four games shipped with the notorious StarForce DRM) is more liberal in this regard than the whatever-licensed SuperTuxKart (whose perspective is more "just use Blender lol")
OS INSTALLATION
Windows people have had GUI programs for making customized, automated/unattended install media since the XP days: yet Linux still has whole distributions that are just Debian, Arch or Fedora with cushier defaults and the Gentoo distro is still percieved as "the one where you install everything by hand" because it doesn't ship any kind of installation wizard (not even on the GUI images).
I'd gladly take a Linux equivalent: even if it only built ISOs around oddball distros like Buildroot, Yocto or TinyCore.
LOSS32, FUTURE OF THE LINUX DESKTOP?
(it's an actual project being worked on as I speak: I’m just surprised that it hasn’t been tried and done before)
“I can't tell you how many times the ability to just download a goddamn .exe file and run it in WINE has saved my ass. Seemingly every creative project I undertake eventually requires downloading some piece of software which is either impossible or impractical to rebuild myself, and whose Linux and macOS ports no longer work or never existed. There's more than three decades of Win32 software — .exe files! — that can run in WINE or (of course) on Windows. No other ABI has that kind of compatibility record. WINE can even run Win16 stuff too.”
“A desktop environment where everything runs in WINE will stimulate making WINE better for everyone, whether they're going to use this project or not.”
“As a bonus, the OS would still technically be a Linux distro, so it would be possible to run Linux software when necessary, something ReactOS can't do. ”
- Hikari no Yume, on the project’s official website
Loss32 is an effort to leverage Wine as a full-blown desktop environment for a Linux system, rather than using it as a compatibility layer.
The existing Wine frontends (i.e Q4Wine or Lutris) don't accomplish much beyond alienating the user from the process of running Windows software on non-Microsoft platforms.
The convenience features or easily accessible configuration options that they do offer would be more useful if they were implemented as part of a desktop environment, and using a spruced-up version of WineDesktop as the primary window manager (even for Linux software) is a fairly reasonable approach: especially if you backport some of the perks of the Unix window managers.
- holding the super key to move and resize windows without touching the titlebar or edges
- option to make the windows transparent during move and resize
- option to make inactive windows transparent
The first one seems to have been standard practice exist since 1987’s TWM, the latter are available in XFCE (one of the more populer graphical environments on Linux) and probably many others.
As much as I understand the desire to run Win32 software on Linux as a way of avoiding Linux's slightly bothersome packaging ecosystem, basing your entire OS around a proprietary ever-changing ABI is pretty undesirable in the long haul.
To this end I suggested including a debugger or disassembler as a way of encouraging people to reverse-engineer proprietary software and port them to other platform, and Hikari agreed to the former.
All things considered, I'm surprised that this one hasn't already been attempted by some radical LibreOffice developer who thinks that creating a FOSS stand-in for Windoze is just as important as a FOSS stand-in for Office, or some Qubes developer trying to build the most secure and auditable way of running Windows software (who am I kidding, they're probably okay just running Windows in a virtual machine :P).
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authored in FeatherPad, pasted into LibreOffice Writer to see how well it works as a HTML editor (not very well)
email:
moses_izumi[at]disroot[dot]org