I don't think the next big thing will be a new operating system -- that's thinking too shallow. We've tried dozens over the years, and right now we're dividing between consumer experience and server work (and poorly at that; no Linux distribution these days bothers to pretend they're separate any more). Plan 9 also swam as far as it could off to the deep end and didn't catch on, for a few reasons; it's a genuinely good model but as we know from this startup game, the good ideas don't always take hold.
I suspect even if you designed something better than Plan 9, which would be a feat, the smart minds and money are already thinking past Intelville. Getting past The Architecture (what do we call it? IBM?) that's been a staple of computing for decades is the next big thing. That's what the author is hinting at, I think, and I'll be interested to read his paper.
(ARM isn't what we're looking for, it's just a better Intel. Same architecture.)
One of my deep-seated beliefs is that backward compatibility can hurt more than benefit, and this is sort of a corollary.
Oddly: Linux started as a desktop personal computer operating system (with one user: Linus), and that's always been his focus (though others have of course had other interests).
The funny thing is that there's not a whole lot of difference between the needs of servers and personal systems. Both value uptime and latency, both benefit from hotplug flexibility (personal systems because we're always plugging things into them, servers because you can't take the system down when adding/modifying parameters), security's important, sandboxing, device support, and what all else. The biggest likely difference is whether and how advanced a direct graphical output device is attached, beyond that, they're similar.
As for scrapping everything and starting over: it's almost always a mistake. Refactoring and incremental improvements discard much less knowledge and provide a continuous migration path (Plan 9's biggest failing, absent licensing, since fixed but far too late). Virtualization may well offer a buffer against this -- we can run old environments in their own imaginary boxen.
>I don't think the next big thing will be a new operating system -- that's thinking too shallow.
What exactly do you have in mind? As long as the new thing is Turing-complete, the path of least resistance says that we'll just drag all the old baggage over with us.
The stack we have is incredibly malleable, there is no such thing as a sufficiently clean break. The ability to fix it now is as present as it ever will be, pretending otherwise is naval-gazing that relies on the assumption the process of architecting new paradigms for a fresh pasture and building out a new stack on top of that could somehow beat to market the more simple process of porting what we've already got and bolting on access to the new nicities.
I suspect even if you designed something better than Plan 9, which would be a feat, the smart minds and money are already thinking past Intelville. Getting past The Architecture (what do we call it? IBM?) that's been a staple of computing for decades is the next big thing. That's what the author is hinting at, I think, and I'll be interested to read his paper.
(ARM isn't what we're looking for, it's just a better Intel. Same architecture.)
One of my deep-seated beliefs is that backward compatibility can hurt more than benefit, and this is sort of a corollary.