Recently I've come to believe that you don't need "applications" at all, but rather components that can be put together every which way. OpenDoc was sort of like that and something like a smalltalk system is also sort of like that.
Either way, these *nix style operating systems are not great for personal computer users. They can either interact with their machines as pure consumers (app level) or learn a full blown programming language and the ins and outs of the OS. There's nothing in between. It's like having zoology and quantum physics, but without biology, chemistry, etc in the middle.
Yeah. But there is a case for keeping it simple even for professional / server stuff. I mean the success of python is the best illustration. It's a dog by any metric but it allows to keep things simple, which has a lot of value in itself. Developer and IT people have enough complexity dealing with their domain not having to add the complexity of their tools to that.
Either way, these *nix style operating systems are not great for personal computer users. They can either interact with their machines as pure consumers (app level) or learn a full blown programming language and the ins and outs of the OS. There's nothing in between. It's like having zoology and quantum physics, but without biology, chemistry, etc in the middle.