Exactly this. I'm as big a fan of "alternative tech timelines" as the next nerd, but I also can see in retrospect why we have the set of compromises we have tod

Exactly this. I'm as big a fan of "alternative tech timelines" as the next nerd, but I also can see in retrospect why we have the set of compromises we have today, and all along I watched the intense efforts people made to navigate the mindbogglingly complicated minefield of competing approaches and political players and technical innovations that were on the scene. People have been working damned hard to build things like Gtk, Qt, etc. not to mention Wayland, etc. all the while maintaining compatibility etc and I personally am happy for their efforts. BeOS/HaikuOS is a product of a mid-90s engineering scene that predates the proliferation of GPUs, the web, and the set of programming languages that we work with today. There's nothing wrong with it in that context, but it's also not "better." Just different compromises. The other one I see nostalgia nerds reach for is the Amiga. A system highly coupled to a set of custom chips that only made sense when RAM was as fast (or faster) than the CPU, whose OS had no memory protection, and which was easily outstripped in technical abilities by the early 90s by PCs with commodity ISA cards, etc. because of the development of economics of scale in computer manufacturing, etc. It was ahead of its time for about 2-3 years in the mid 80s, but in a way that was a dead end. Anyways, what we have right now is a messy set of compromises. It doesn't hurt to go looking for simplifications, but it does hurt to pretend that the compromises don't exist for a reason. EDIT: I would add though that "multiuser" as part of a desktop (or especially mobile) OS has maybe proven to be a pointless thing. The vast majority of Linux machines out there in the world are run in a single user fashion, even if they are capable of multiuser. Android phones, Chromebooks, desktop machines, and even many servers -- mostly run with just one master user. And we've also seen how rather not-good the Unix account permissions model is in terms of security, and how weak its timesharing of resources etc is in context of today's needs -- hence the development of cgroups, containers, and virtual machine / hypervisor etc.