Found this video interesting and wonder if there are any alternatives within Linux systems
Watched the first video. Interesting.
Reminds me of when I realized some twenty years ago that hierarchical filesystems are just a convention and I was daydreaming about a dynamic database-like filesystem where files are stored with meta data in tags that could be addressed according to whatever your chain of association may be. I even conceptual a bridge of how common OS like Windows or Linux could connect and interface such a file system using the familiar system of slashes transparently for the user with all the benefits and none of additional complicated learning. Of course this was way beyond any technical scope of mine and I didn’t bring it to attention beyond nerdy beer conversation.
Maybe I was on to something.
The BeOS file system actually had such functionality: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/the-beos-filesystem/
If you’re a fan of that principle, then consider checking out Logseq.
It’s main workflow is that you use the Journal page and write down everything that’s on your mind, may it be projects, research, social stuff, or whatever.
And while writing, you link that stuff with other stuff, and in the end, even when forgetting the exact search cues, you can go hunting for words mentally, and always find what you wrote months ago.
Obsidian, the competitor of it, is also great, but more similar to traditional note taking software, and therefore more hierarchical.
Logseq is FOSS too btw!
Whatever the UI in Jurassic Park is was a genuine linux interface at some point so maybe that
I think familiarity is a big part of why things catch on. If something is too different to what people know there will be only a few people who want spend their time learning it. And it would have to be revolutionary for these people to be able to convince others to also learn it.
It would have been helpful if in the video they would have discussed how an alternative could have even looked like and why it would be better. This is a demo of Project Xanadu, the system Ted Nelson envisions where he shows how it could work. He seems to propose that it would be hyper interconnected for every user of the system and every piece of media in it (another interview where he describes it). I’m not sure something like this could reliably work at a scale similar to the internet (he claims his system could have been the internet had they delivered it earlier) and also I’m not sure how it would work for what people actually want to do with the internet in addition to reading documents. Companies also want a certain control over the work they publish so I don’t think they would like a system that connects their work to everything else. And you also have to keep in mind that there are people who want to actively do bad things so I am not sure how a hyper interconnected system could protect its users from bad actors.
Edit: Found another video where he describes and shows a version of how a document with paid content works. It looks interesting but I’m still not sure how this would work on the scale of the internet and if it would even be better than how things work right now.
Brendan Howell’s The Screenless Office is “a system for working with media and networks without using a pixel-based display. It is an artistic operating system.”
You can “read and navigate news, web sites and social media entirely with the use of various printers for output and a barcode scanner for input”.
