Every operating system in popular use today is the direct descendant of something that came before it. However, software isn't biology, and there's no iron-clad rule which dictates that the "genes" of the operating systems which have come before should still be present in the operating systems of the future. So has the time come for another go at reinventing the wheel, or is this just a fundamentally silly idea?

This has all happened before

Obviously, at some point people had to invent operating systems. So there's no infinite regress going on here, but in a world where a few operating systems have cemented themselves like a software Mount Rushmore in the market, there are still some brave souls who try to make something different every now and then.

Google's Fuchsia operating system is an interesting example. Its source code repository just popped up online one day, and a few years later debuted on the Google Nest Hub device. Fuchsia uses a new kernel called Zircon which has nothing to do with Linux nor Android, and though inspired by Unix, doesn't work like Unix and isn't a Unix-like OS. There was some speculation that Fuchsia was meant to replace Android and ChromeOS, at least on Google Devices, but so far this hasn't come to pass.

Microsoft's Midori is the other major example that comes to mind. Midori was a secret project at Microsoft that was part of a plan to completely replace Windows. There's not that much known about Midori, but it seems that its fundamental design was completely different from Windows, and that there was cloud-technology and the ability to run programs spread across multiple hardware nodes baked into the fundamental design.

There's also ReactOS, which isn't really a clean-sheet brand-new OS in the normal sense, but an attempt at a clean room reverse engineering project for Windows. In other words, there's no Windows source code in ReactOS, but it's intended to work with software and drivers written for Windows, while being completely open source.

So far, none of these or other attempts have managed to displace Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, or iOS and their variants from the mainstream, but there might be good reasons why this is something worth pursuing.

Operating systems carry lots of baggage

The operating systems we use today are complex systems built on code bases decades in the making. Despite the shiny new interfaces and bolted-on features, at their core there's quite a lot of decades-old code. This isn't just because of laziness, of course. If something still works, why change it? Not to mention that you want newer versions of the operating system to run software meant for older versions.

That said, all of this baggage can lead to software that's bloated and too resource-hungry, or to an OS that feels disjointed. Windows 11 is a key example of this, with lots of new features and user interface elements that duplicate things that still exist in legacy parts of the OS. The venerable Control Panel has been a part of Windows since version 1.0 and even after finally indicating that it would be removed from Windows, Microsoft reversed course. Go one step deeper than the first level of the Windows 11 context menu, and you're straight back to the Windows 95 or 98 era. I don't want to pick on Windows in particular here, since all established operating systems are like this in general.

If you could make a clean sweep and design a new OS that wasn't dragging various boat anchors, you could base it around modern hardware, software development doctrine, and all the lessons learned since the dawn of the computer age. It would be painful to lose all of that legacy in a way, but starting over with a better foundation for the future also has its perks.

A new OS could be much more secure

In the early days of computing, operating systems, and the introduction of services like email, the concept of cybersecurity was paper-thin, if anyone even gave it serious thought at all. After all, who would think that every member of the public would one day have their own computer? Who could predict that people would go and network all these computers together? Not the people who laid the foundation for the technologies our modern operating systems are built on.

Much of cybersecurity is plugging inadvertent security holes in legacy code. It's bolting on additional security measures such as HTTPS or email encryption, because this wasn't part of the fundamental DNA of those protocols. Exploits from legacy OS components are discovered all the time.

For example, back in 1996 Microsoft made a significant change to Windows NT 4.0 moving the window manager, graphic device interface, and graphics driver to a kernel-mode driver called win32k.sys. Remember that after Windows 98, Microsoft deprecated the DOS-based Win 9.x family and switched all of Windows over to Windows NT. NT 4.0 was the direct precursor to Windows XP, and every Windows system up to 11 today is still based on Windows NT. That change back in 1996 happened in an attempt to get better performance from the limited hardware of the time, and today win32k.sys is used in various exploits with potentially serious implications.

It probably won't happen

While I think there will always be attempts at making a clean break from existing OS lineages, the sheer inertia of them makes it quite unlikely that we'll get a revolution instead of the expected evolution. Maybe one day when our robotic probes reach alien civilizations, some Linux kernel source code will end up being the first thing of humanity they ever see. Hopefully the code comments aren't too harsh.