Oxygen (InstanceTopic, 2)

From Oxygen

Oxygen is a cross-platform PC environment which could be thought of as a "sub-operating system", an emulator, or a layer like Wine or the Java virtual machine. It's designed to run under a host operating system – including Windows, Linux and Mac – to avoid having to deal with hardware and kernel issues, while still having control over the programs running in it.

You might not notice it, but the graphical environments of Windows, Linux and Mac all suffer from the same problems, which originate from archaic ideas that have never been rethought for the purpose of backward compatibility. Users are all too used to programs being slow, not being able to arrange programs and documents quite how they want, having nearly every program look and act completely inconsistently from the next. Developers are often found wasting their time re-inventing the wheel with such things as tabbed documents, open/save dialogs, customizing keyboard controls, or skinning their programs.

Oxygen is intended to pull all of those annoyances out of every individual program, and handle them itself. Developers can count on Oxygen to perform tasks that every single program needs to do, and users can count on Oxygen to make all of their programs use a consistent interface which they can customize to their heart's content.

This is the philosophy behind Oxygen. Such a thing isn't possible in any environment that already exists, because of the millions of programs out there that would need modifying to work with it. So we're starting from scratch, aiming to gradually build up a library of programs that work with Oxygen to do things properly.

Currently, Oxygen is still mainly in the planning stage. Check back in a year or two for an implementation.