Re:Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop
by GMoromisato on Thursday September 24, 2026 @02:30PM
(#49834909)
Agreed! That was also one of the original goals of WinFS in Longhorn, but I wonder if it was just too early. The original problem with WinFS is that it was too slow, but that was before SSDs and several Moore doublings ago.
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Re:Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop
by Mister_Snuggles on Thursday September 24, 2026 @02:51PM
(#49835212)
Possibly too early, or possibly too ambitious. Looking at the Wikipedia article[0], it feels like it was definitely too ambitious. The design seems to have everything that you'd expect out of a full-blown relational database.
BeOS feels more like a document database - no defined schema, just attributes attached to your files.
Re:Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop
by miffy900 on Thursday September 24, 2026 @10:55PM
(#49839690)
that's because it was a full blown relational database - it literally shipped with a desktop variant of SQL server (MSDE) and the WinFS bits were implemented in .NET on top of that.
I recall installing the WinFS beta 1 release and suddenly the winfs-related background processes were eating up 150MB+ of RAM at a minimum, even with no stores created or files indexed - when machines back in 2005 had 512MB of memory that's actually a lot for what is supposed to be a background service.
Windows XP back then only needed 128MB of ram to run. they made a mistake in not building it on top of something akin to sqlite - hell they could've implemented maybe 70% of what they shipped in beta 1 with just sqlite alone.