Thoughts on Operating Systems

I recently sat down and took a survey of all of the technology that I own. I found that all of them have a different operating system. I realized it is because I like operating systems in general. It got me thinking more about them, what I’ve used in the past, and where I think they’ll go in the future. Here are my thoughts on it.

Here are the various operating systems I either own or have used in alphabetical order.

• Android – I ditched Android smartphones, but I kept Android tablets. My current Android is a Samsung tablet. I love that you can upgrade the memory easily with an Android device, and it’s our road trip streamer because I have a 1 TB micro-SD. Yes, the Google Play app store is trash, but it plays nice with my Windows PC. I typically use it daily to move documents from my main PC when I no longer want to read sitting in my office chair anymore.
• ChromeOS – I freaking love my Lenovo Chromebook. Yes, it is nothing more than a web browsing machine, but it is so fast. I also like booting into Linux to mess around with stuff there. Again, the app store for ChromeOS sucks, but dang if it isn’t a crisp little OS.
• iPadOS – I liked my iPad but I passed it along to my son. I felt too much redundancy between having an iPhone and an iPad. He still has it believe it or not and it works great. The iPad is the best tablet, there is no argument there.
• iOS – I’ve been an iPhone user since the 4. I will most likely be one forever. I also have Apple TVs and an Apple watch. I like how they all work together. People love to hate Apple, but I also find the largest detractors have never had an iPhone as well. It’s more directed at the people who have an iPhone than it is about the iPhone itself. Also, the App store is top notch.
• Linux – I used Linux Mint on a budget PC I purchased many years ago as my daily driver. I like the idea of Linux, I just don’t like it. It feels like you have to jump through too many hoops to do simple things. Of course, that is changing today, and with AI you have an immediate reference to figuring things out. There is also SteamOS, which is built on top of Linux, that is becoming more popular. But overall, I ditched it when I couldn’t game with it. Beyond my Chromebook, I mess around with Linux on my Raspberri Pi. 
• macOS – the one I’ve used the least. Most of my macOS use was in college, where I found few users in the Apple computer lab. I almost purchased a Mac-mini before the current rush, and I wish I would have before the prices went up. I wanted something to jive with my iPhone, and since I have a multi-monitor setup for my work PC, I reasoned I could just plug and play into it. Unfortunately it got out that people can run agents on them, and they’re no longer the value they once were.
• Windows – oh Windows, how I loathe thee. My main PC is Windows 11, a custom gaming rig I built before prices went nuts. I hate that Windows has basically become spyware. I hate that it wants to load everything up into OneDrive. I hate how it’s moving everything towards a subscription model. Also, when did it become so buggy?

That sets the stage for my final thoughts, the future of operating systems as I see it. 

• They will become more abstracted – AI is going to be a huge part of your OS and how you use your computer or mobile device is going to look much different in just a few years. You most likely will not be clicking around folders or individually launching apps. In the future the AI is going to retrieve what you tell it to retrieve and do the work that you tell it to do. People will most likely care about the better AI agents out there more than they’ll care about if it is Windows or Apple or Linux. 
• Your device won’t matter any longer – cloud computing is going to take over. These controversial data centers are going to play a larger part in your computing life than you think as they will do much of the lifting your device used to do in the future. There’s so many facilities being built right now but not all of them will be used for AI. There will be capacity set aside for other types of computing and storage as OEMs will bank on your usage of their DCs via a subscription model. The days of having a couple terabyte hard drives in your house where all of your stuff is being stored is going to go away, exacerbated even more by today’s hardware prices. People think this won’t happen, but there’s evidence that people are more comfortable with subscriptions than they’ve been in the past, and this is just going to be an expansion of that business model.
• The OS will become more intrusive – expect more commercial spying and less alternatives to getting around that spying if privacy matters to you. Agents will soak up everything you do, send it back to the data center, learn from it, and customize the output. You’ll see more adds everywhere, in the taskbar, in your AI chat, it’s going to be pervasive. Unfortunately it’s been proven time and time again people do not care about selling their personal information in exchange for something free, so expect this as a given.
• There will be less operating systems in general – mobile and non-mobile will coalesce into one. There’s no point in maintaining separating ecosystems anymore since less people will care about them because the focus will be on agents. Windows and Android will probably meld into one, and I can’t tell you what that would look like, but Apple will certainly ditch having iOS and MacOS separate. If these things are just going to be shells for AI agents running in the cloud, you might as well get a Chromebook. 

I know those predictions seem dire to someone who grew up with  computers and likes the different flavors of operating systems, but it is nonetheless inevitable.