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linguae 2 hours ago

Rob Pike of Plan 9 and Go fame lamented this back in 2000 in his “Systems Software Research is Irrelevant” talk:

http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf

I’d love to see a new operating system that explores radically different APIs for applications. The trouble is writing an operating system is a large effort. Barring market effects, OS has to be heads-and-shoulders better than existing ones in order to convince application developers to write software for it. Windows, macOS, and Linux are good enough for most people, even techies. Additionally, it is often easier to modify an existing operating system such as Linux than to go through the trouble of writing a brand new operating system.