> An OS should not do everything. Hardware storage resources are generally the memory, disk, and network connection (and if you're getting really deep, the cache and registers). A good OS should only provide access to those resources as efficiently as possible across a wide variety of hardware.
It sounds like you're talking about kernel only. So I guess your OS of choice is something like LFS?
My view of an operating system is very different; it's supposed to be a complete system ready for productive work as well as a programming environment and platform for additional third party software.
> Pushing everything to the OS will often give you worse performance, locks you into a single OS vendor, and slows down innovation from third parties. Bad idea.
Pushing everything to third parties will often give you massive duplication of effort and dependencies, excessively deep stacks that eat performance and make debugging harder, locks you into a clusterfuck of dependency hell, and slows innovation from first party because now they must be very sure not to break the huge stack of third party stuff that everyone critically depends on. There'll be no cohesion because third parties invent their own ways of doing things as the stripped-to-the-bones OS has no unified vision, documentation is going to be all over the place, there's nothing holding back churn... development of third party applications is slow and frustrating because the lowest common denominator (underlying OS) is basically magnetic needle. Bad idea.
This is largely why I prefer BSD over Linux, but I share the author's frustrations with Unix in general.
It sounds like you're talking about kernel only. So I guess your OS of choice is something like LFS?
My view of an operating system is very different; it's supposed to be a complete system ready for productive work as well as a programming environment and platform for additional third party software.
> Pushing everything to the OS will often give you worse performance, locks you into a single OS vendor, and slows down innovation from third parties. Bad idea.
Pushing everything to third parties will often give you massive duplication of effort and dependencies, excessively deep stacks that eat performance and make debugging harder, locks you into a clusterfuck of dependency hell, and slows innovation from first party because now they must be very sure not to break the huge stack of third party stuff that everyone critically depends on. There'll be no cohesion because third parties invent their own ways of doing things as the stripped-to-the-bones OS has no unified vision, documentation is going to be all over the place, there's nothing holding back churn... development of third party applications is slow and frustrating because the lowest common denominator (underlying OS) is basically magnetic needle. Bad idea.
This is largely why I prefer BSD over Linux, but I share the author's frustrations with Unix in general.