> Nobody wants an opinionated operating system in which files are fancy trees of objects done in One Way that everyone has to follow who codes for that operating system.
And yet there is ChromeOS. There is iOS. There is Android. These are highly opinionated platforms. So I think that yes, people do want these things. Developers in particular want lots of high level APIs because it makes software production easier, which is why so much software targets the web (effectively an "OS" these days). The web follows implements zero of the standard UNIX API primitives yet is very successful.
There's a lot of stuff that can be done with operating systems research, I'm really pretty sure of it. That doesn't mean you can't layer things properly, or that you can't implement your "OS" also as an app in the same way that Chrome is both an app and an OS. We're constrained by lack of imagination and the difficulties in getting market adoption for new approaches. Developers prefer to be locked in to a multi-vendor API with open source implementations, than a single vendor API with a proprietary implementation, even though they'll do it when a market is there (mobile apps). But that preference kills the commercial incentives to innovate, and open source devs just won't do it, which is why every new OS project you see is a clone of commercial operating systems from the past.
And yet there is ChromeOS. There is iOS. There is Android. These are highly opinionated platforms. So I think that yes, people do want these things. Developers in particular want lots of high level APIs because it makes software production easier, which is why so much software targets the web (effectively an "OS" these days). The web follows implements zero of the standard UNIX API primitives yet is very successful.
There's a lot of stuff that can be done with operating systems research, I'm really pretty sure of it. That doesn't mean you can't layer things properly, or that you can't implement your "OS" also as an app in the same way that Chrome is both an app and an OS. We're constrained by lack of imagination and the difficulties in getting market adoption for new approaches. Developers prefer to be locked in to a multi-vendor API with open source implementations, than a single vendor API with a proprietary implementation, even though they'll do it when a market is there (mobile apps). But that preference kills the commercial incentives to innovate, and open source devs just won't do it, which is why every new OS project you see is a clone of commercial operating systems from the past.