> What we really need are OSes that take the ideas from human-computer interaction from Xerox PARC and Viewpoints Research Institute and take them further into mainstream, using safe languages in the process.
How are modern OSes prevented from using said ideas (which ideas exactly?) simply because they are a UNIX implementation?
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/
Everything else is fluff, and could stay just like it was on UNIX System V.
Hence why for macOS, iOS, tvOS, Android and ChromeOS, having an UNIX kernel is just a matter of convenience, given their application models and programming languages.
Apple and Google could eventually migrate to something else as kernel while keeping their Objective-C, Swift, Java and JavaScript APIs.
NeXT based NeXTStep on UNIX as a door into the then new UNIX worksations market, but it never had a CLI culture like the other UNIX vendors.
GUI workflows like on Xerox PARC were always important to Steve.
Is your answer to my question: "Modern UNIX OSes cannot take advantage of said ideas because they are POSIX compatible."?
So, each UNIX clone project ends up replicating POSIX and doesn't move beyond what is actually yet another TWM clone with pretty graphics.
GNOME, KDE, Unity are the only ones that try to somehow modernize the experience and tend to get pretty vocal pushback.
The UNIX culture, is the culture of the command line and something like XFCE is probably the GUI a TWM user is willing to accept to manage its XTerms.
We already had it in 1961 as ESPOL and NEWP.
http://www.liquisearch.com/burroughs_large_systems/algol/esp...
Followed by many others, before UNIX's adoption due to its source being available for free.
> I'm not sure I want another UNIX implementation.
Yeah, they just keep repeating what was already done and without much research besides adding mainframe features.
As Rob Pike puts it:
"We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy."
from https://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-p...
What we really need are OSes that take the ideas from human-computer interaction from Xerox PARC and Viewpoints Research Institute and take them further into mainstream, using safe languages in the process.