All of these points sound like macos apart from 4, possibly 6 and definitely 7.
Your home directory is your profile/account (what's the difference on a single computer?).
Your home directory is your profile/account (what's the difference on a single computer?).
MacOS has some good ideas. 1 and 2 actually apply to a lot of OSs from the 90s. Good luck finding a spacial file manager today though.
> Your home directory is your profile/account (what's the difference on a single computer?).
The difference is that there is no OS concept of an "account". Right now, you can't take your home directory between systems and have it just work because the OS needs you to have a user account. If your user ID on the new system is different from the old one then your file permissions will be broken.
The idea is, that the OS doesn't really care about protecting the machine from the user in a personal computing scenario. It does, however, care about protecting the system and the user's data from malicious applications, so that's where the permissions should be.
You can get Finder to open each item in a new window and hide the sidebar to make it spatial-like, although I am not sure if there is a method of making "open in new window" the default.
I think the separation of account and profile is a difficult concept, unless the directory had a specific UUID associated intrinsically with it so that permissions could be applied to objects that didn't know about "users"?
As I recall, Pottering is actually working on portable home directories for Linux. Naturally, the solution is over-engineered and involves a new service and file format.
After I went to Mac I didn't look back. Now I look at the mess and debate of SysV, DHCP server in the startup etc. and can only imagine that this home system concept will be the same. As you say, over-engineered and unreadable. Ugh.
AppleScript?