Comment by jmward01

I am 50/50 on this particular argument for why OSes are in a rut. I think there is actual competition in the form of the various distros out there and they have passionate advocates with real skill trying new things but they don't really take in a more mainstream way and they rarely feel revolutionary. I think this is more of a track gauge problem. It is hard to provide a truly novel OS without building all the infra around it so that people can actually use it. That takes resources at a scale that few can muster. What if I wanted to build something that kills off the idea of a file system? All the apps out there are written at their very core with this concept in them so even if it is a better idea, it is incredibly hard to bring it out to market and only huge companies can do it. At the same time though the huge companies are pushing their versions of things which makes it hard to compete and have even small innovation in the space. I don't have a solution here. I had hoped things like web assembly would have led to OS breakaway by now but it hasn't really happened. Maybe it still will.