[anon4]

I agree with you, and here is one more concern: a lot of hardware can't be shared at the hardware level. Think of the soundcard for example. A lot of PCs have simple Intel-HDA audio controllers that don't have hardware-level separate streams. You need a software defined mixer that will share the resource with several applications. For years and years on Linux the situation was that you do get direct hardware access and it sucked balls. Either your card has hardware mixing and you can play like 8 sounds at once, or it doesn't and you can't. In that time, at least 3 different userspace mixers appeared, all incompatible with each other, which of course means that your choice of Gnome vs KDE also dictates which music players you can use.

The OS absolutely needs to define standard usage APIs so we don't end up in the situation where everybody rolls their own. Yes, giving applications bare-metal access is good. But that's a minority of applications in a minority of usage cases. Give people a good simple API for the average case, and THEN let them take exclusive low-level control when they need it.