I really like how the advent of mobile operating systems has allowed operating system designers to re-imagine how to create an operating system user interface. Isn’t it great that even novice computer users can use pretty much any mobile operating system and common user interface behaviors are automatically intuitive and consistent–such as pinching to zoom or rotating a device, tap and hold, swiping. This is a good thing. We should have more revolutionary ideas like this in technology.

On desktop Linux, wouldn’t it be nice to have a modern and consistent UI and API for everything in /etc? This would make Linux much less intimidating to new users. This abstraction layer should be transparent about its operations, so advanced users could know what is going on behind the scenes as well.

Installed applications could provide an API to this abstraction layer, so that, for example, configuring Apache or Postgres is not so painful.