SolidOS vision & goals

🌟 SolidOS vision

When you get a new phone, PC, or tablet, they usually come with an operating system that provides some basic functionality to just get started and be productive. And, more importantly, you can personalize your OS to your needs by installing apps and, manage content, and much more. This is what we envision for SolidOS too!

SolidOS is much more. SolidOS is showcasing the possibility of Solid for the future, and we mean:

• true data ownership: management of personal data & authorization control;
• avoidance of vendor lock-in to services: easy moving to a different Pod or WebID provider;
• data reuse between applications: with help of data interoperability and data discoverability.

SolidOS should allow people to create, bit by bit, a web of social-linked data of their work and their play, and their lives.

🎯 SolidOS goals

There are two sets of goals for SolidOS: technical goals and high-level goals more long-term.

💻🎯 Technical goals:

• Implement & guide Solid specifications;
• Improve and streamline UI;
• Improve code test coverage;
• Convert code base to typescript;
• Refactor the code to be clean code;
• Develop SolidOS such that users can add their preferred Apps.

🏰🎯 High-level goals:

• SolidOS should be a complete web-technology-based operating system for any new computer or Solid compliant data store.
• SolidOS, as a web-technology-based OS, comes in two flavors: as a native app (also knows as Data Kitchen) and as a web browser app (SolidOS Databrowser or short SolidOS)
• When running as a native app (Data Kitchen), on a laptop or desktop, or mobile, it should allow the user to make use of their local file system in very much the same way as a Solid Pod. You should be able to work locally first.
• You should be able to set SolidOS up for any existing folders you have full of things like photos and music, and it should let you listen to them, look at them, and share them very flexibly with anyone in the world.
• SolidOS, unlike a typical set of native applications, should be very interconnected.
  • One can do anything with anything - so data from different applications interlink in a more powerful way to solve real-life problems. For example, you can start a chat with anyone or a combination of people who have Solid WebIDs. You can adopt anything as the target of a task you want to track later. You can like, flag, keyword, bookmark anything. So one application will use others in a recursive way to get its job done.
• SolidOS should be personalizable
• The user interface should accommodate a wide range of devices, screen sizes, bandwidth so it should at least use a responsive design.
• When using SolidOS with a Solid Pod, because the Solid Pod is on the web, SolidOS provides the public view -- the interactive interface -- that the user has with the rest of the world. For example, you can choose to display a personal homepage when someone first navigates to your Pod. The way this public homepage appears to others should be customizable, so the user, individual, or business can be proud of it.
• SolidOS should be modular.
• SolidOS should dynamically load new code modules in real-time as a function of a user's preferences of how to handle different data types.
• A new code module providing new functionality in a new domain should be able to appear in SolidOS as a stand-alone App.

🚗 SolidOS roadmap

We keep track of the present and future functionality of the SolidOS product as a set of tasks in a “Roadmap” system. The task manager keeps track of crazy ideas, stuff we are developing now, and stuff which we have done. There is a table view and two Kanban board views.

• Check out the task manager for more details.