Jonathan Blow

I don’t know what to do about OSes. Linux is the best option for simplification right now, but it’s also become complex. But anything simpler has zero traction.

In the short to medium term, someone could make a dramatically better OS by starting with the Linux kernel and just erasing all of userspace and starting over there. But in the long term a new kernel is needed that would be based on different ideas.

Have you any opinions on the various BSD kernels? Dragonfly takes multithreading very seriously.

I think the thing that Unix has become is just the wrong model for a personal computer in 2020 and onward. You want something secure by default, with communication via memory instead of pipes, drastically fewer executables, and no device driver / no need to go through kernel

every time you access a device. Note that even just this latter constraint would simplify current-day kernels massively.

Thanks Jon. Do you have a simple explanation for how competing programs would share a device safely? Something akin to locks in shared memory?

I think that depends on the device, because different tasks are different. It seems easy to figure out how each individual task would work for most devices. The hard one I don't know about is the file system, I feel like that still needs to be in kernel, but haven't thought