I think the author wants a bunch of really specific personal workflow ideas/concepts they have to be the standard, which is typically what these rants are. Such rant posts are always interesting to me as I do question my own workflow just to see if there are good ideas I'm missing out on, but a lot of the author's ideas just don't strike me as all that important in most cases, and in some of the complaints, I'm not sure what the complaint is.
Their complaint on the filesystem, for example, falls flat for me, but partially because I think I don't understand what they want or how BeOS did it. Maybe the author has a special meaning for "...sort by tags and metadata", but this looks to be baked right into Finder at the moment; I can add in a bunch of columns to sort by, tag my items with custom tags (and search said tags), add comments, and so on. Spotlight also has rendered a lot of organization moot as you just punch in a few bits of something about what you're looking for (tags, text within the document, document name, file type, date modified by, etc.) and you'll find it. I don't know exactly what is missing from modern OSes (Windows search isn't too bad either) that the author isn't contented with.
The idea of multiple forms of interaction with the computer are okay, but quite frankly it starts to get into an eerie situation for me where I'd rather have to take a lot of steps to set up such monitoring as opposed to it being baked into the OS. I realize that I'm squarely in luddite territory given the popularity of Home Assistants (Echo, Apple Homekit, Google Home), but to me these seem like very intentional choices on the part of a customer; you have to go out of your way to get the hardware for it and disabling it is as simple as pulling the plug. Look at the non-sense we're having to deal with in regards to Windows Telemetry - to me this is what happens when such items get baked into the OS instead of being an additional application; you end up with a function you no longer can control, and for no other reason than to satisfy the complaint of "I have to download something? No thank you!"
I could go on, but the author's rant just doesn't seem consistent and instead seems to just want some small features that they liked from older OSes to be returned to modern OSes. There is a huge issue with bloat and cruft and some real legacy stuff in Windows and macOS, and desktop OSes aren't getting the attention they should be, but these suggestions aren't what desktop OSes are missing or what they need.
Ars Technica did a retrospective on the BeOS filesystem[1] which may help explain things. The tl;dr of it is that the filesystem is the canonical database that all applications can use and query without any special domain specific knowledge. I'm not up to date with how MacOS works so it's possible they've added a layer on top of the filesystem which works similarly. However, I do know that Windows is nowhere near that level, mainly because it's encouraged for metadata to be stored in file specific ways.
On the Mac, the metadata is stored in a file (inside /.Spotlight-V100) rather than inside the filesystem (a la BeOS File System). An application can provide Spotlight Importer that can extract metadata from a file during index (this is why mdimport is taking a lot of CPU time).
AFAIK, this approach is contrary to the BeOS approach, where application write the metadata directly. Spotlight's approach do have few benefits, though, such as able to provide metadata for files in network drives, or for removable disks that might not be using filesystem that supports metadata.
No, that's only part of the story. Early on, they were using resource forks for data but metadata as well. Then they moved to filesystem attributes and those just grew. You can have tags in there, as well as text, icons, settings etc. It's pretty standardized, but on top of that, you can use Spotlight metadata too, both in the EA as well ans the V100 DB.
Using a structure other than the file to store information about the file seems like a big problem (like the iTunes example Josh used). It's inherently not portable. Even if the OS took extra steps to copy the additional data along with the file, that still replies on the target OS to recognize the additional file(s), and incorporate it into whatever search functionality it has. Supporting the tags or metadata in the file simplifies things quite a bit.
A fascinating piece of trivia I was not aware of. To me it seems reasonable that instead of trying to reinvent the whole shebang that instead you get these incremental changes over time that just make an OS really really good.
OS X too a lot of getting used to for me as a kid, as I had an old mac clone and an iMac with 10.1 side by side in my living room, and I loved my little mac clone. OS X didn't immediately win me over because I was just too used to OS 9 and had everything I needed on my offline mac clone. But I distinctly remember Spotlight being what really sold me on OS X because from the get-go it worked basically as intended, and man was it magnificent. If the author of Spotlight is on APFS, I have a lot of faith in it then.
>I think the author wants a bunch of really specific personal workflow ideas/concepts they have to be the standard, which is typically what these rants are.
This one in particular:
>Why can I dock and undock tabs in my web browser or in my file manager, but I can't dock a tab between the two apps?
Their complaint on the filesystem, for example, falls flat for me, but partially because I think I don't understand what they want or how BeOS did it. Maybe the author has a special meaning for "...sort by tags and metadata", but this looks to be baked right into Finder at the moment; I can add in a bunch of columns to sort by, tag my items with custom tags (and search said tags), add comments, and so on. Spotlight also has rendered a lot of organization moot as you just punch in a few bits of something about what you're looking for (tags, text within the document, document name, file type, date modified by, etc.) and you'll find it. I don't know exactly what is missing from modern OSes (Windows search isn't too bad either) that the author isn't contented with.
The idea of multiple forms of interaction with the computer are okay, but quite frankly it starts to get into an eerie situation for me where I'd rather have to take a lot of steps to set up such monitoring as opposed to it being baked into the OS. I realize that I'm squarely in luddite territory given the popularity of Home Assistants (Echo, Apple Homekit, Google Home), but to me these seem like very intentional choices on the part of a customer; you have to go out of your way to get the hardware for it and disabling it is as simple as pulling the plug. Look at the non-sense we're having to deal with in regards to Windows Telemetry - to me this is what happens when such items get baked into the OS instead of being an additional application; you end up with a function you no longer can control, and for no other reason than to satisfy the complaint of "I have to download something? No thank you!"
I could go on, but the author's rant just doesn't seem consistent and instead seems to just want some small features that they liked from older OSes to be returned to modern OSes. There is a huge issue with bloat and cruft and some real legacy stuff in Windows and macOS, and desktop OSes aren't getting the attention they should be, but these suggestions aren't what desktop OSes are missing or what they need.