> I disagree. It is very easy for me to modify Linux. I just don't have the skills to do deep modifications.

Part of this is that setting up a development environment is kind of tricky.

> And i don't think languages really help here.

They really do actually.

> Directly, what sorts of edits do you wish you could do, but feel prevented from doing?

Imagine an OS where you can do something like "view source" with html, you can edit it, and immediately re-execute it. I think that the list of things I wouldn't look into tweaking would be shorter.

Emacs basically has this. It is why I mentioned it. There are a set of functions that are compiled c code, but the majority of emacs is just a click away from my looking at it and modifying if I wanted to.

And that is the thing, I rarely want to. Or, I'll want to, but it isn't easy enough to do that I can get it done. Often, the thing I would like to do is a melpa install away. And the amount of code involved with many features is far beyond my skillset, it usually seems.

> I think that the list of things I wouldn't look into tweaking would be shorter.

So can you give maybe a top 3 concrete examples of things you would change?

>Imagine an OS where you can do something like "view source" with html, you can edit it, and immediately re-execute it.

Do you mean view the kernel's source? Or user program source? Either way, this already exists, it's just often unsuitable for OS software.

Sounds like you want a Smalltalk OS. If you haven't already I suggest playing around with Squeak.

http://squeak.org/