> I suspect the root cause is simply that building a successful operating system is hard.
It's hard but not that hard; tons of experimental OS-like objects have been made that meet these goals. Nobody uses them.
What's hard is getting everyone on board enough for critical inertia to drive the project. Otherwise it succumbs to the chicken-and-egg problem, and we continue to use what we have because it's "good enough" for what we're trying to do right now.
I suspect the next better OS will come out of some big company that has the clout and marketing to encourage adoption.
What's hard is making your backwards compatiblity story sane. You need to somehow make your new system provide some obvious advantages even to ported apps, while still plausibly allowing them to work with minimal porting effort.
But I think this "reinvent the world" concept has a deeper flaw - in all the discussion I didn't see any mention of how you make it performant despite that being an identified problem. If everything's message passing...how much memcpy'ing is going on in the background? What does it mean to pipe a 4gb video file to something if it's going to go onto a message bus as ... 4kB chunks? 1 mb?
Remember this is a proposal to rebuild the entire personal computing experience, so "good enough" isn't good enough - it needs to absolutely support a lot of use cases which is why we have so many other mechanisms. And it also (due to the porting requirement) should have a sensible way to degrade back to supporting old interfaces.
Microsoft owns the desktop partly because they absolutely were dedicated to backwards compatiblity. You want to make progress - you need to have a plan for the same.
Exactly. You need to have the most critical apps running on your OS (development IDE, modern web browser and mail mostly). That's going to be a significant effort especially if those apps need to be rewritten as modules to take advantage of the paradigms the new OS offers.
The author doesn't want "an OS", but "an OS that operates like one out of a sci-fi movie, tracking and interpeting my actions and responding to natural language". Toy OS projects aren't this.
It's hard but not that hard; tons of experimental OS-like objects have been made that meet these goals. Nobody uses them.
What's hard is getting everyone on board enough for critical inertia to drive the project. Otherwise it succumbs to the chicken-and-egg problem, and we continue to use what we have because it's "good enough" for what we're trying to do right now.
I suspect the next better OS will come out of some big company that has the clout and marketing to encourage adoption.