while i have learned smalltalk already a few years ago, it was only a short time ago that i found a smalltalk application that is so useful that it's worth it to keep a pharo smalltalk environment running at all times.
as a result i became easy to use that to build a small gui app to help me solve some issues.
the key takeaway is this: i have wanted to learn more about smalltalk ever since i started learning it, and i experimented with a few apps. but the effort of having to start a smalltalk environment every time i had a few minutes to dabble around just seemed like not worth the trouble. (it was like an 'out of sight, out of mind' thing, and it always seemed a bit to much to get used to how smalltalk works just for experimenting.)
but now that the environment is always running, and needs to run for that one vital application i am using, for which it is worth it to keep the smalltalk image uptodate and current, that makes it easy to spend free minutes to dabble around and try things.
An operating system should be more like this
you are right! i didn't even think of that. i mean, i have been curious about lisp-machines and even smalltalk runnig directly on the machine, but i didn't look at my current setup in this way until you mentioned it.
in fact, my home office is set up with dual monitors with gnome so that one monitor scrolls through gnome workspaces and the other is static with pharo maximized.
then a few days ago i discovered a package that offers multiple desktops within pharo, so now i got a multi-desktop gnome on one screen and a multidesktop pharo on the other, and it feels like having two computers with a shared keyboard and mouse.