Windows XP imo was on the right track, until vista/win7/win8 came along.

And this is why there are tens of thousands of users collectively telling MS, "You can pry it from my cold, dead hands!"

That jarvis thing look amazing

You know, what's more, is that there is voice recognition and there's natural language comprehension. And they're not the same thing. You can easily see that by the state of automatic translators, which don't even need to fully comprehend a text to do the translation, but even as is, they're pretty primitive at best. Talking to Siri and saying "what's the weather in san franscisco", then have it display to you a page with the weather in that area *seems* like a step towards "JARVIS", but it only seems that way because of voice recognition, that is, translating the sound into word tokens. What it does with them, however, is actually not that impressive at all: Google "what's the weather in san franscisco" and you'll get the exact same result. It just does a search based on a few keywords. That is, you trigger the commands by speaking and not by typing, but the commands themselves are the same as ever. The goal of actually having a conversation with an AI is as far away as always, and it doesn't matter if that conversation is made by typing, or speaking to a microphone, those problems are almost orthogonal.

So what I've gathered from this thread is people are looking at an OS and saying I don't like how it looks or It doesn't support voice recognition, and are using these reasons to justify the creation of an entirely new operating system from scratch.

That's retarded.

That's like looking at a car and going I don't like the look of the steering wheel, better replace the entire engine!

People, every operating system us customisable! You want voice recognition? Software already exists. You don't like the look of the UI? Get a window manager and theme. Don't like the way your terminal works? Have you considered a different shell?

Re-writing the kernel doesn't contribute anything towards these problems. Writing your own speech recognition software from scratch is also most likely counterproductive. Instead, you should be teaming up with existing projects and contribute towards them; you aren't the first to have this idea, and these existing projects are lightyears ahead of whatever your 7-day-old knowledge of speech recognition can possibly spew out into incomprehensible code.

Oh darn, I don't like the look of my doormat. Better design and build an entirely new house, right?!

That jarvis thing look amazing biggrin.png

I might actually give it a spin, it does look awesome!

To me, the perfect operating system is one that is fast, user friendly, customizable/tweakable, and FREE!

Now, as it happens I work for an organization that churns out an OS that is fast, user friendly, customizable, tweakable, and will always be free. We welcome contributions from anyone (although we don't accept all contributions: they need to meet our standards), and because the software is Free, if you don't like it you can replace it or fork it as your whim takes you. Many people find it suits their needs admirably out of the box.

We have literally dozens of designers on staff developing and testing UI alternatives. We have kernel engineers keeping up with new hardware, and security experts keeping you safe. We develop (almost) everything in public and we try to keep the public updated on the status of our efforts.

Our OS is on almost every desktop at Google and is used to develop Android. That should tell you something.

It seems to me this already satisfies most of your stated requirements, and it's only one choice among many solid alternatives. I am not one to dissuade you from starting a new project and doing it all yourself, in fact more power to you. I think, however, the scale of what you propose is much greater than you realize and we would all benefit more if you choose a narrower goal and focus your considerable efforts into that.

And good luck with it.

Indeed the "Perfect" OS would also have the free part attached (assuming quality is also included) but I would sacrifice the Free aspect for "Cheap."

But I always have a feeling that once you tack any price to something, even if it is a penny, you then have competition.

The reason I say this is because if you offer a program for a penny, your competition can match your penny and make a better program. Or perhaps they will charge 3 pennies claiming their program is 3 times better than yours.

But many people don't like to work for free (evidence is all around you, and from my experience I can vouch for it). So you wouldn't have as much competition if it were free, unless your rival made their program a penny claiming that your program is obsolete and cheap (using the stereotype that open-sourced objects are inherently less quality than commercial alternatives.)

I have a business model that would crush any competition around, but the premise of it would either be ludicrous or brilliant depending on a slight change in the intent of the business.

Can you guess what that model is?