What would you replace it with? At the very core you need two things: the notion of a unit of data and some metadata to address it There were some experiments

What would you replace it with? At the very core you need two things: the notion of a unit of data and some metadata to address it There were some experiments along these lines. Instead of files, just make everything an object and have orthogonal persistence for every object. In a way, this was what the early Smalltalk implementations were working towards. I don't disagree that we can drop many of the current filesystem semantics but fundamentally all that really means is changing is the query language to access objects and manipulate their metadata. One thing which Smalltalk demonstrates, is that the query language can simply be the same language used to implement the OS. Activity which looks a lot like database querying, but for objects, not database rows was just an expert level debugging trick of Smalltalk programmers.