[josephg]

Doing a lot of work on a hunch that it might be better is the basis of all science. And all progress in general. Building a fully verified operating system kernel was a massive amount of work - but the SeL4 team still did it because they thought it was a good idea and got funding. (And as I understand it, their OS gets a lot of use in things the baseband chips in cell phones).

Yes, making a new toy operating system is a lot of work. But we don’t need to reinvent all of the software that has been built on Linux to tell if its a promising idea. Just enough to learn and see if the juice is worth the squeeze. And maybe have a little fun along the way.

In general I think it’s really sad how little innovation there is now in the OS space, simply because of how dominant Linux is and how much work it takes to make something yourself. How many good ideas are waiting in the wings because it would take too much effort to try them out? What a pity!

[midoridensha]

>In general I think it’s really sad how little innovation there is now in the OS space, simply because of how dominant Linux is and how much work it takes to make something yourself. How many good ideas are waiting in the wings because it would take too much effort to try them out? What a pity!

People are coming up with all kinds of innovations in computing, just not so much in the OS space because it's considered a solved problem. There's tons of stuff going on at much higher levels, and has been for a long time: virtualization, containerization, microservices, etc. The low-level building blocks are "good enough" for the higher-order things people want to try out now.

We've seen this in many domains: once you have something that works well enough, it's hard to justify effort to optimize it more, when there's other problems to be solved.