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So I would strongly disagree with your notion that an OS cannot be a distributed system. Several OS's, such as Plan 9, were explicitly designed as distributed s

So I would strongly disagree with your notion that an OS cannot be a distributed system. Several OS's, such as Plan 9, were explicitly designed as distributed systems from the beginning. For Plan 9, running it on a solo computer is more the edge case than the common case they designed for, which was a small team with workstations sharing a central server. All of the computers are "running" the OS. The OS is more than one service on more than one machine.

crazygringo 4y ago
Ah thank you. I had no idea. Turns out distributed operating systems were/are a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_operating_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_operating_system "Research and experimentation efforts began in earnest in the 1970s and continued through the 1990s, with focused interest peaking in the late 1980s. A number of distributed operating systems were introduced during this period; however, very few of these implementations achieved even modest commercial success." So looks like they're trying to keep the idea going?