This is interesting, and to some extent, expected. I'd expect that emulating one OS on top of another is going to have performance challenges and constraints in general.

But the deep dive into aspects of Windows and Linux I/O reminded me that I'd love to see a new generation of clean sheet operating systems. Not another Unix-like OS. Not Windows. Something actually new and awesome. It's been a long time since Unix/BSD, Linux, and Windows NT/XP were introduced.

A few years ago, Microsoft developed a new operating system called Midori, but sadly they killed it. MS, Apple, and Google are each sitting on Carl Sagan money – billions and billions in cash. Would it hurt MS to spend a billion to build an awesome, clean-sheet OS? They could still support and update Windows 10 for as many years as they deemed optimal for their business, while also offering the new OS.

Would it cost more than a billion dollars to assemble an elite team of a few hundred people to build a new OS? Would Apple, Microsoft, or Google notice the billion dollar cost? Or even two billion?

If you think there's no point in a new OS, oh I think there's a lot of room for improvement right now. For one thing, we really ought to have Instant Computing in 2018. Just about everything we do on a computer should be instant, like 200 ms, maybe 100 ms. Opening an application and having it be fully ready for further action should be instant. Everything we do in an application should be instant, except for things like video transcoding or compressing a 1 GiB folder. OSes today are way, way too slow, which comes back to the file access performance issue on Windows. Even a Mac using a PCIe SSD fails to be instant for all sorts of tasks. They're all too damn slow.

We also need a fundamentally new security model. There's no way data should be leaving a user's computer as freely and opaquely as is the case now with all consumer OSes. Users should have much more control and insight into data leaving their machine. A good OS should also differentiate actual human users from software – the user model on nix is inadequate. Computers should be able to know when an action or authorization was physically committed by a human. That's just basic, and we don't have it. And I'm just scratching the surface of how much better security could be on general purpose OSes. There's so much more we could do.