For the vast majority of users the OS is just a way to get to the web.
The web (browser) is the OS, but the apps are centralized, incompatible, and primarily SaaS subscriptions (or worse, ad based). Desktop operating systems are primarily thin clients to these services. Native apps on the existing stack are dead outside of a few niche applications. It's why I think Urbit is cool, if you built an OS from first principles to take into account the web what would it look like? It's basically moving the API layer up the stack to include auth and application distribution.
The web (browser) is the OS, but the apps are centralized, incompatible, and primarily SaaS subscriptions (or worse, ad based). Desktop operating systems are primarily thin clients to these services. Native apps on the existing stack are dead outside of a few niche applications. It's why I think Urbit is cool, if you built an OS from first principles to take into account the web what would it look like? It's basically moving the API layer up the stack to include auth and application distribution.