I like Linux, but there are a few things about its model — and the Unix model in general — that I have disliked for a long time, especially:

• the idea of “everything is a file”. Historically, it probably made sense, but today we often need different representations of all kinds of system resources, for example as serialized objects, etc.

• it seems quite messy to me to put files on disk, devices, processes, sockets, system information, and so on into one single tree structure.

• on top of that, allowing mount points anywhere in this structure, which after being unmounted can make the same path point to a different device, feels almost dangerous to me. For example, after a reboot, some storage might fail to mount and services may start writing to the system disk instead. Sure, this can be prevented somehow, but those are already workarounds.

... and a few other things.

So I asked myself: If I were designing an OS from scratch, how would I do it differently?

And so I designed and developed my own kernel and userspace, and the result is my experimental open-source system — LiberSystem

A microkernel OS written in Rust, based on typed objects, capability-based security, isolated services/drivers, and explicit volumes instead of classic mount points.

I do not see it as a replacement for Linux, more as an experiment.

I would be interested to hear what you think: does this direction make sense to you, or is the Unix model still the best approach in your opinion?

More info about my project: https://libersystem.com
Source code: https://github.com/libersoft-org/libersystem

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