I'm in the "we need something newer and modern, designed from the ground up" camp and also don't have a concrete proposal (just half-baked ideas). I'm just disappointed that with all the creative people out there in the industry, we keep just reimplementing Unix after all this time.
Have we truly reached a global optimum in system design with Unix? We're done? Forever? We're just going to keep writing new layers and APIs on top of it without even considering a redesign?
I'd like to see something different just for the sake of being different. Maybe it would be better, maybe worse, but we'll never know if we don't try.
I think nobody tries because everyone knows there’s a gigantic chicken or egg problem.
Everything is written for Unix-like systems (or Windows which is not that different) and everyone is not going to port all that software to a significantly different paradigm. So even if a new OS was great, the suspicion is that nobody would use it because no apps.
In reality I think good compatibility libraries could bridge the gap, so it would not totally be futile to try. But you’d need those compatibility layers out of the box.
Another big ugly hairy problem is hardware support. Existing OSes have vast libraries of drivers all built around POSIX-like paradigms. Getting good hardware support on a new OS is going to be a ton of work, maybe more than the OS itself.
Yes, also because the stuff has free implementations. For something to beat free it will have to be significantly better to put up with the inevitable annoyances until it matures.
I think the 10X rule applies here. It would have to be 10X better in a mixture of areas like performance, programmer productivity, ease of system administration, security, UI/UX, etc.
Have we truly reached a global optimum in system design with Unix? We're done? Forever? We're just going to keep writing new layers and APIs on top of it without even considering a redesign?
I'd like to see something different just for the sake of being different. Maybe it would be better, maybe worse, but we'll never know if we don't try.