Urbit and the impatience principle

The mismatch comes about because Urbit is currently for Urbit developers, and will be for a while - and even by those standards it's in alpha. The path from , say, "merge this code to a desk manually" to "click this button on your urbpanel" is just one of infrastructure and schlep work, and it'll inevitably happen - either our community developers will standardize, or core developers will come up with something. For a silly analogy, we're still burying the gold under California and teaching prospectors how to work a pan individually - BART comes later. (Our user experience will be vastly better than BART, of course.)

Ideally, the average user won't actually host their urbit, but they will administrate it, in the same sense that they administrate their smartphone today. Server administration today is Unix administration, not iPhone administration. The demand for something that's more like iPhone administration has, so far, given us more containerized and sandboxed Unixes. Urbit is a bet that the solution to this demand is developing for a 2010s network OS rather than running tiny, restricted copies of a 1970s mainframe OS.