Ask HN: Why don't big tech companies unite to build an OS?

Really? The cloud servers I use have networking stacks, drivers for various block storage devices, drivers for character-oriented devices (terminals), maybe GPU drivers.

Running in the cloud means the hardware got virtualized, not that it went away from the OS point of view. A Linux cloud server appears to have disk drives and ethernet cards.

Then don't compile in the drivers. This is the usual approach on embedded systems such as openwrt where flash storage is a precious resource. The Linux build system has a configuration system, complete with it's own UI, dedicated for doing just that. If that's your only reason there is no need for a new OS - Linux already does it.

But usually you don't bother. You just compile everything as modules, and Linux only loads the modules for the hardware it discovers. Doing creates zero long term overhead, except for the storage space the modules consume on disk. Disk is near free in cloud systems.

Floods, fires, drought. Food shortages. Tech oligarchs suffocating in bunkers while angry mobs burn their ‘AI’ data centers to the ground.

Most contributions to the Linux kernel have already been from tech corps for a while now: https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/

The whole point of open source is that people who rely on the software will contribute to it. The tech giants all definitely rely on Linux; without it their businesses would not exist. They hire engineers by the hundreds to ensure that Linux does exactly what they need it to do. They are cooperating to maintain and improve Linux purely out of self–interest, but in so doing they benefit everyone simultaneously.

Nvidia doesn't need an OS. They sell hardware, and their hardware receives driver support on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and previously, MacOS. If you built and documented an OS for AI-based tasks, Nvidia would probably be the first OEM to merge hardware support.

Linus' comment towards Nvidia was not made from the perspective of a business, either. He was lamenting that their drivers are nonfree and that their desktop support was lazy. Neither of those things matter to 99% of businesses that are using Nvidia hardware for AI compute. Also, both aren't strictly true anymore in 2025 as Nvidia officially supports Wayland now and technically has "Open" drivers.

The smarter "f u nvidia" move would be for big tech companies to go to TSMC directly for their GPUs and cut out nvidia. They'd have to design the chips of course but that's probably easier than designing and writing an OS.

> How about “fuck you NVIDIA”?

That got the appropriate response.

Hint: it wasn't replacing Linux, as that would be an impossibly huge task.

Instead NVIDIA rewrote their drivers, so secret source code no one was supposed to see run on their secret source hardware. The system that replaced was asking every customer work around the licences incompatibilities by compiling it themselves.