Found this video interesting and wonder if there are any alternatives within Linux systems
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.
Whatever the UI in Jurassic Park is was a genuine linux interface at some point so maybe that
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!
You can do tag-based file management on Linux. Linux filesystems support “extended attributes” or “xattr”. There is some software out there that uses xattr for tagging. I don’t know what the best options are right now for tag-based file management, but I think it exists.
Looking at what’s out there I see there are also apps that each use their own out-of-band tagging schemes. There’s a CLI, tmsu, and a GUI, TagSpaces. I don’t think these interoperate with each other’s tags.
Of course those supplement instead of replacing hierarchical organization.
The talk of hypertext and “escaping paper” makes me think of Obsidian which embraces hyperlinking, tags, and mind mapping via its canvas feature.
Now that you’ve mentioned Obisian I realised that systems like it are quite different from how most things work. I use it myself and really like it, however it also takes quite some effort to get the best out of it. You have to actively create useful links between things and think about different ways you would want to access the content to be able to actually find it when you need it. For example you need to create aliases for elements if they are known by a different name in another context.
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”.
