Comment by vezzy-fnord

The problem isn't so much Unix, but rather that we have largely failed to evolve it since the days of AT&T System III. The Bell Labs people kept working on Research Unix up to V9 with plenty of great features (like V9 IPC streams) that were never replicated anywhere else, before moving on to the ultimate culmination of these ideas in the form of Plan 9 and Inferno.

Meanwhile Linux has always been a boring SysV Unix clone that only occasionally ripped some features (and in a questionable manner) like procfs, sysfs, epoll, signalfd so you don't have to do the self-pipe trick, inotify, cgroups and namespaces. Stuff that competing systems often did much better.

The BSDs have been quicker to do more novel things, but by far the only two modern Unices to get the memo are DragonFly BSD and Solaris/illumos.