Just to pile on here: - The linux security model is backwards. All applications spawned by me have permissions to read, modify and write all of my data. The se

Just to pile on here: - The linux security model is backwards. All applications spawned by me have permissions to read, modify and write all of my data. The security model stops malicious programs messing with the operating system (which I could just reinstall anyway). But the security model does nothing to stop programs corrupting / encrypting / stealing my data. Wat! We need capability based security for applications (or something like it). Its not sexy, but applications need to have restricted access to my filesystem. - The file API is a bit of a mess if you want to edit files atomically. (And who doesn't? Crashes should never result in corrupted data). Implementing atomicity in userspace on top of the existing write() and fsync() APIs is inefficient and stupidly complicated. The kernel should add an API which does atomic writes to files, and 90% of applications should use it. And while we're at it, add either a syscall for file write barriers (sort of a much finer grained fsync) or add completion events like windows has had for decades. That would let us dramatically speed up modern databases, with basically no cost. - Files in sysfs/procfs/etc should contain JSON. Handling 18 bajillion text files, each with custom formatting is awful. And if you want to watch for changes, the current model of polling + diffing is ridiculous. We should have a generic "watch item" API to get granular JSON patch (or something) events from kernel objects. That could be used to monitor network traffic, handle USB+bluetooth device insertion/removal/status change, see the firewall status, debug kernel drivers, tell you when a file has been modified, and so on.