It should be possible to get creative and business work done on a computer while knowing almost nothing about an os but I use Windows at work and the situation with the file save dialogue in office is a farce. I can't imagine how confusing it is for someone who has no conception of what a file is.

Files and folders are already a helpful metaphor taken from paper based office work. You have container folders and you can put different files (pieces of paper) into different folders. The thing thats a bit conceptually hard for regular people is the nesting, that folders can contain folders can contain folders. The real world has some nesting too, like putting folders in drawers but it's more limited in number of levels. This tends to be the thing that supposedly "more user friendly" apps remove and only allow two levels or so. Basically collections or lists, eg playlists. Or tags. But once you understand nesting, files and folders are quite intuitive.

Without the helpful abstraction of files and folders, all we'd have are bytes stored at various addresses or sectors of the hardware.

> Without the helpful abstraction of files and folders, all we'd have are bytes stored at various addresses or sectors of the hardware.

I agree with most everything else you said, but would slightly push back on that. I actually quite like the idea of non-hierarchical blob storage searchable via arbitrary indexed metadata, as well as the idea of content-addressable storage (e.g. with magnet links). While folders are an elegant abstraction, I really feel that we shouldn't be beholden to it.

Either way - the OS is, if anything, the thing that provides the file/metadata abstraction. It doesn't exist to hide it from you.

Without an OS, you've got a CPU and memory-mapped hardware devices. You certainly don't have files.

I was particularly referring to Office applications which have a first stage save dialogue with some folders shown but if you want to navigate to another location you need to browse which opens another window. In the physical office metaphor this would be having to change your shoes to look in a different file cabinet

Oh I see, I hate the new UI of Office. I somewhat accept the ribbon, but this new full screen file menu replacement where they try to make you save stuff to the cloud makes me want to go back to the good old File > Save as... > Dialog popup of Office 2003.

This is actually an interesting example. To me it sounds like it actually should be less confusing to a person who has no preconceived notion of what a file should be, and only wants to save their work and reopen it later, not worried about what shape the saved object takes.

On that note, I remember how absolutely ecstatic I was when I first set up Sublime Text and discovered that unsaved editor tabs always reliably survive restarts; it essentially flips the script, whereby I've lost multiple saved files by accidentally deleting them, but I've never accidentally lost work in unsaved tabs, and I've never actually had any interest in figuring out where and how these tabs get persisted - it just works.

I had commented this above, but the OS should be flexible enough to do whatever the user needs it to do. "What it needs to do" is pretty broad, but I think that's the point.