OsFree project: OS/2 Replacement

Re:OsFree project: OS/2 Replacement by guessbest on Monday April 20, 2020 @02:12PM (#22926645)

I think the GP was referring to features that were advanced for the day, but these days we take for granted, like a system control panel controlled entirely through a GUI rather than any text files like Autoexec.bat and config.sys

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:OsFree project: OS/2 Replacement by ptx on Monday April 20, 2020 @06:47PM (#22929675)

Also features that we should be able to take for granted but are broken or missing in current systems, such as spatial file managers.

In OS/2 and classic Mac OS, folders you opened would remember their window position and other properties (including custom background image in OS/2) so that you could find things in a very human way by remembering e.g. "the small blue window in upper left".

Windows 95 copied this in a slightly broken way – you could open the same folder in multiple windows at the same time and give them conflicting properties, which breaks the model. Windows 98 (and the IE 4 upgrade to Windows 95) merged the whole thing with the web browser which broke it even more.

Mac OS X also had a half-broken implementation of this, since the file manager tried to combine the Mac OS Finder with the NeXTSTEP file manager which was completely different. John Siracusa has written extensively on this topic: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/

[ Parent | on HN ]