With lots of things being developed through web technologies, and many things being web-based so that it is cross-platform, will operating systems still be relevant?
We can differ philosophically by using Debian or Arch or Windows or Mac, but if nowadays applications are web-based or developed through something like Electron such that it can run on practically all modern operating systems. what is the relevance of operating systems galore?
Don’t get me wrong I love FOSS and Linux and stuff, but it seems that the paradigm right now is creating web applications, with many things being web-based.
Am I off, or is this something you also think about?
P.S. I’m a total noob when it comes to IT, so the question might be weirdly phrased.
A website isn’t going to make my CPU communicate with my PCIe bus
Of course, without an operating system, all you have is hardware and other devices. But I meant for the casual desktop user, this does not really matter for them I don’t think. I’m sorry, I forgot to put it in the question. Obviously operating systems must exist, I get that, but I mean that for a desktop user, who treats their computers as bootloaders to the browser, so to speak, will different operating systems be relevant for them, i.e. the majority of users?
To put it simply, no.
It’s really exemplified by Chrome OS users, that is pretty much a browser bootloader, sure there’s more to it than that, but the majority of users isn’t going to even find out about crostini and whatnot, because if they can get all the applications they need on the browser then they’re good to go.
So, as long as the browser is able to tap into the hardware in a performant enough way to enable all the kinds of applications that were once thought to be native only, the potential for the browser to replace all other apps is there.
For those who care about the technicalities there will always be value in choosing an OS with specific features though
This reminds me of a talk by Rob Pike that was made 23 years ago: https://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/utah2000.html
All the OSes running the web servers and client browsers:
“Are we a joke to you??”
