One more general-purpose thing I miss very much is filesystem. Really what is a good option for a usb disk filesystem which you would like to use on Mac, Win and Linux? Seems to me that without using Paragon/Tuxera/etc. you're screwed.
Why can't we get people from major tech companies together and have them develop a good on-disk format which supports the features we all need, and then everybody can go back and write their own implementations? Like we do with Unicode, or IP. And like we should do for many other features.
For all the talk about the importance of separation of interface and implementation, operating system designers really suck at it.
How well an operating systems has a separation of concerns between interface and implementation really has very little (unfortunately) to do with business incentives. Even if the Linux kernel had perfect separation of concerns, there's no way to force Microsoft or Apple to support it in their products.
Not to mention the problem with standards: https://xkcd.com/927/
[1] https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/08/28/exfat...
- Here's a standard that kind of works and everybody is using it.
- Hey, we invented this cool new thing that isn't part of that standard but people seem to like it! (XHR, Canvas, ...)
- OK everybody let's put that into the standard as well so we can all agree on how it works. Thanks!
There was no way to "force Microsoft or Apple" to make a web browser, either, and yet they both did, and made it part of their operating systems.
And I think that, “For sharing a filesystem” nowadays your best option is ”the cloud” for most people.