Comment by darksaints

This was a heartbreaking and terrible read. I've been feeling a bit of disillusionment about linux quite a bit lately, mostly due to bad/weird decisions being made at the distribution level. Reading this extends that disillusionment down to the kernel level.

The problems cited are portrayed as sociological problems, but I really wish people could recognize that all of them can be mitigated, either substantially or entirely, with a single purely-technical solution: microkernels.

* Almost nobody needs to upstream code to the kernel

* Trusted codebase size becomes negligibly small

* Maintenance burden for drivers, subsystems, etc., falls on the users of the subsystems affected, and not the entire community

* Broad language compatibility by service interface instead of ABI compatibility. The need for a singular compiler is reduced in scope down to the size of the subsystem instead of the entire ecosystem.

The biggest problem that can't be solved purely technically is the entitled user problem, but even that is partially solved. This is because the barrier to contribution is substantially lower:

* I can write code in Rust, but I don't know C.

* I can easily write simple drivers for some hardware features like battery managers and fan controllers and temperature sensors, but I don't know anything about kernels.

* I have a lower, but non-zero understanding of security, and would not feel comfortable writing code that runs on ring 0, but wouldn't feel inhibited writing code that benefits from process isolation.

Those attributes about myself inherently mean that for a microkernel OS, I can be a contributor, but for Linux, the best I can be is an entitled user.