Comment by nxc18
1 day ago
I don’t think the post has a lot to offer, but I will share thoughts on how a modern operating system can add _a lot of value_ both for non-agentic users and for agents.
Looking towards macOS and iOS for example, an underrated feature for the “it just runs your web browser” crowd is all of the system-provided databases. These turn rather specialized systems - photo libraries, music streaming, calendaring, contacts management, and mail into shared databases that link applications together.
On iOS it goes much further - because of HealthKit, my Withings scale, my Garmin (when I had one), my MyNetDiary nutrition tracker, my continuous Glucose Monitor, and my third-party analytics apps share the same access to my data. And it is done securely - I can choose exactly which part each sees. This is a tremendous resource for both developers and LLMs.
My calendar, hosted on a personal server but available through Calendar, is transparently available to my to-do list app - so I can see my appointments, my tasks, and even my workouts (thanks to health kit) in one view.
Weather is a system service on iOS. Calendar is a system service. Contacts is a system service. Health data is a system service. Even music - third-party apps can control and consume your music library on iOS - is a system service (if you use it).
My Mac knows how to develop RAW files out of the box, and it can connect with integrations to get them printed, and use my library metadata to sync my favorites to my phone. I have a third party app that syncs my Apple photos library to my NAS.
A good OS, like iOS or macOS, could be the fabric that holds all your vibe-coded and ephemeral LLM apps together. I see it making a whole new category of things possible.
For the record: I didn't suggest this post did have a lot to offer. I didn't submit or upvote it. I pretty conscientiously kept it simple and abstract, because (as I said in a different thread) this genre of posts ("I just left the company I'm highly associated with, to do this new thing") is deeply cursed.
You still gotta write the post, though, because otherwise what you get is a circulating Twitter post.
I'll write something more fulfilling about this next week, I think.
But so much of macOS is also uninstrumentable except via undocumented APIs that are unreliable at best. Why wouldn't Linux or even FreeBSD be even better? They're not limited to content but even the source that can be updated and rebuilt to do literally anything.
Honestly, as a long time Emacs user, agents are amazing because when all your functionality and data lives in open source code and text files, the world is literally your oyster.
Linux and the BSDs might be more instrumentable, but the rest of the experience is so fragmented in comparison. Regardless of category, there is no single service or data format that everybody has agreed to use and build on top of.
The advantage of the Apple approach is that the user’s data is instantly available across third party apps. For example, instead of needing to build (or import) a whole CalDAV apparatus to be able to build a little calendar-based todo app, you can just use the system calendar API and let the OS do the heavy lifting, making your app much more lightweight and instantly usable with almost no user configuration. This naturally applies for scripts and agent skills, too.
> Why wouldn't Linux or even FreeBSD be even better?
Because Linux doesn’t offer a rich set of system services built around the needs of desktop users and exposed through curated APIs.
Linux can’t be better at providing a shared calendar API or a shared photos library API, or one of dozens of other APIs because Linux just doesn’t have those features.
Some particular DE could offer those features, but then who is going to build the app ecosystem around that? And isn’t it going to suck when you want to make a Linux native photos app but it doesn’t work on Ubuntu because your LLM was trained on KDE?
My photos are not text files.