Don't get distracted by the OP's nostalgia. The point they are trying to make was that older OS's had much more decoupled concepts for things like changing OS,

Don't get distracted by the OP's nostalgia. The point they are trying to make was that older OS's had much more decoupled concepts for things like changing OS, applications, and settings. Decoupled enough that everything was accessible to the user through a small handful of concepts. You had to understand a disk drive, how to move things in a file manager, and how to run things... and that was about it. Our current systems are the opposite: tightly integrated to the point where every action can cause an avalanche of secondary effects, and flexibility is greatly reduced. The short list of main recommendations are not crazy at all on this community: - boot from a read only, immutable OS on easily-replaceable media. (Ahem containers, nixOS) - applications should be encapsulated in a single object which can be executed from anywhere in your filesystem. (Flatpak, containers) - applications and the OS should be designed for offline by default. (Any user of EA games would back this idea) - only persist user settings across boots, ideally in an OS neutral format (containers) - expose less to zero UI configuration to the user (core design concept in Apple land, I gather) - single user no login by design (many linux distros, windows until recently...) There are more but you should read TFA. These are not radical concepts, they're the norm in other contexts.