Ask HN: What should an ideal, all-new OS look like?
Would it be all THAT different?
In other words, would such a "best of show" OS (one that's within our technical reach, right now) look much like the incumbents? Would it be more serviceable, do more, or just be somewhat faster, smaller and more reliable? How much easier could it make life for programmers, if at all? Security? Future-proofing? How much economic value could doing such a thing actually add even if you could ignore legacy? (I know, not enough to actually dump legacy, but how much? Enough to make you pay 20% more for a computer, if that were the price you had to pay? 10%?)
Speaking of future-proofing, how likely are AI advances (deep learning) to heavily profit from such a rethink?
I'm hoping to avoid any discussion of why companies haven't done this and almost certainly won't: because I think we all know why such a project might not be profitable or very practical. I still use Qwerty, after all.
I love Rust, but since existing OSes can be rewritten in Rust and that may very well happen, if only a bit at a time; I don't see Rust as a decider, here. Of course, we want Rust, we just don't have to restart to get it.
This query was sparked a bit by this quote from romaniv: "One would think that in 2017 we would be using an OS that takes the best ideas from Xerox Park/Star, Oberon and Cloud 9. At least on new devices (like tablets) which don't have to keep backward compatibility." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15704806