There's a lot of prior art and stuff existing along those lines. Plan 9 allowed every process to have its own /proc filesystem separate from the global one, and

There's a lot of prior art and stuff existing along those lines. Plan 9 allowed every process to have its own /proc filesystem separate from the global one, and could give out per-process references to hardware devices too. Illumos implemented the Linux kernel's interface so you can run binaries built for GNU/Linux inside a secure Zone. (MS implemented something similar so it's nice you can run bash natively in Win10 now, but there's no security in that...) Guix/NixOS have a package management system with atomic upgrades and rollbacks that should never lead to a borked system. Dependency management is crucial since you can isolate all you want -- build an OS where every application is its own docker image if you want -- but as soon as things want to talk to each other, if you don't account for API changes on that communication channel you will have a broken system. But can any of it overcome worse-is-better? Are these things really that desirable for a personal computer or are they more suited to production servers? I've been using Gentoo as my main OS since 2007, on my current rig that I put together in 2009, and I wouldn't be that surprised if I'm still using it in 2027. Even knowing about other systems' advances I'm still using my own preferred set of compromises.