If $whatever were the dominant platform today, the number of incompetently-coded-but-mandatory-in-many-sectors kernel extensions would be, best-case, exactly the same as it is for Windows today, with pretty much the same outcomes (i.e.: generally not much, with entertainingly spectacular outliers like, well, Crowdstrike).
For $whatever to be actually better in a meaningful sense of the word, it would need to:
-Have a market share that, if not equivalent to that of Windows today, at least makes ISVs pay attention. This is really, really hard: not because "M$ controls all the hardware vendors historically and forever", but because hardware is an extremely low-margin business, and the room for experimentation is minimal...
-Similarly: most OS sales are to enterprises, and they have certain control issues that need to be addressed. "All that Active Directory (or whatever Microsoft marketing chooses to call it this decade) does" is a good starting point. Yes, this "compromises user freedom", bot possibly not in the way you think...
-Finally: in order to lock down kernel-mode access, offering user-mode APIs that are both completely fail-safe as well well as fool-proof for 80%, if not better, of use cases is mandatory. The engineering effort required to achieve this would most likely look a lot like that involved with, say, AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, with, say, similarly impressive results?
BTW, notice I did not have Linux, to most people in the US, that word as no meaning :(
Too bad people are willing to buy new hardware instead of replacing Windows 10 with some Linux Dostro (or BSD).
The only people who would care would be existing Mac users watching from the sidelines.