The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]
&gt;Unix was designed for the computing environment of then, not the machines of today. Unix survives only because everyone else has done so badly. There were many valuable things to be learned from Unix: how come nobody learned them and then did better? Started from scratch and produced a really superior, modern, graphical operating system? Oh yeah, and did the other thing that made Unix so very successful: give it away to all the universities of the world<p>That is a very good question! What we have now it&#x27;s a bunch of old operating systems, no novelty, no new computing paradigm. Every research OS some clever guys and hobists came with, was killed. Linux, *BSD and MacOS are modeled after UNIX, a many decades old operating system. Windows is very old and Microsoft can&#x27;t do anything about it since it&#x27;s customers care the most about backwards compatibility.<p>Server landscape is not so much plagued by compatibility issues, since many software can be ported to a different operating system without needing a POSIX layer.<p>Also, when new computers types arrived (think smartphones and tablets), there was an opportunity to get rid of the old. Still, mobile oses were based somehow on UNIX.<p>In the late 90s - early 2000 there were many new operating systems proposed by companies, researcher and hobbists for servers, personal computers and PDAs. Many doing new things and not being based on other operating systems. There were a reason to be optimistic and enthusiastic about the future of the operating system landscape.<p>Now, it seems we are adding layers upon layers of lipstick to the same old pigs. It&#x27;s not that UNIX and UNIX like systems were bad. They were ok. In the 70&#x27; to 90&#x27;. It&#x27;s not that Windows was bad. It was ok from the &#x27;90s to 2000s. But now we need newer, better OSes to better adapt to the surrounding reality which changed much.