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Hi,

The words in the thread title that describes everything is 'superbly' polished copy' that has been built over the years to become a stable OS. Sure there will be persons who cannot understand let alone know how to maintain such a OS but if you are really wanting to have a system that can be worked on properly then Gnu/Linux UNIX like OS would be my choice.

I come from a UNIX environment and have been forced to work with Windows and Mac based systems. I would take UNIX like system any day to meet the needs and allow me to fix issues without having the need for someone to hold my hand.

This babel keeps coming up and yes you trolled me into a response to something that is still chasing it's tail. Turn key systems fill a need for some but when you want to tweak something to do what you need to do the job then give me a open platform.

Sure some open source applications can fall short but you can find the jewel that will meet your needs and it will not cost you the bank.

Opinions can be easily formed but that does not make it true let alone thoughtful.

Hope this helps!
Have fun & enjoy.
:hattip:

Perhaps Lanier wanted something like the plan9 OS -> Wikipedia.
Where even the network (including the Internet) is mapped into a local device tree.
Copying to or from a remote computer is done with a simple file-copy command. Fantastic, isn't it!

But, if you imagine all the necessary encryption/authentication on the network, it would blow up the kernel.
In practice most virtualization is done in user space. If the kernel makes the archaic difference between disk, memory, network, then shared libraries or a "framework" can flatten ("virtualize") the handling.

Last but not least, the applications make the difference.

P.S.
The Hewlett-Packard project The machine trys to make no difference between disk and memory. They modified a Linux kernel over and over again in order to achieve it, and they found the thousands of optimizations ("caches") a great obstacle...

At least you didn't utter the word "communist", which is a classic. Mr Lanier, on the other hand, speaks openly about "digital maoism". ;)

Jokes aside, your post was a déjà vu for me as well. Perhaps you should give yourself some more time (you seem to be a bit confused) and see in practice what free and open source software actually means for users, system administrators and programmers. By the way, Skype is a Micros*** product, therefore I wouldn't use it to draw conclusions about the free software ecosystem (talking about apples and oranges). There are several free VOIP software alternatives, based on open standards, that work like a charm. If only more people used them. Of course there are other issues that wouldn't be there if only more developers wrote games for Linux. If only more hardware vendors supported Linux decently. If only more OEM sold machines with Linux preinstalled. Et cetera.

Meanwhile I checked out Mr Lanier's website, and found out that he's been working for Micros*** since 2006. I know that correlation doesn't imply causation, but ...

I don't think there's much to say about what Lanier wrote in the first paragraph. Yeah, GNU is definitely a Unix-alike and isn't optimized for creativity. That's true of all operating systems in use today, I guess.

RMS had a good vantage point when the Lisp Machines died. It's not a mistake that he chose a portable system that would run on smaller machines. Emacs seems to have satisfied his Lisp addictions, too.

It's also been possible to build and run all sorts of systems on top of Unix-alikes that are quite a bit more sophisticated than the base system. I'm typing this reply into one of them, right this moment. It would be hard to defend a position that the web isn't the product of FOSS and creativity.

That's a pretty grave misinterpretation of either Open Source or Free Software, and not to mention moving the goal posts. If there's a way to make a persuasive argument for something, it's not this.

I haven't read his book. I don't know if the two paragraphs quoted here are part of a larger, more subtle point or not. Otherwise, there just doesn't seem to be much to mentally digest here.