alt Hacker News> maybe all this should just be thrown away and we should invent an FS with ACID semantics.
You're describing WinFS, which looked into and ultimately abandoned Microsoft 20 years ago. I'm sure other groups have looked into this as well, but there's no such thing as free lunch.
> I'm all for gradual improvements but at one point and on we should zoom even further out and pick our battles well.
That sounds a lot like picking up more battles, yet we all still have 24 hours a day. Recursively trying to perfect lower layers will have you like Hal changing the lightbulb https://youtu.be/AbSehcT19u0
Well, recursively trying to perfect lower layers is what I am advocating for us to not do.
As a guy who prefers to stop and think before coding, to me a lot of the older UNIX / GNU primitives seem broken (like the env vars process inheriting discussion that was here a while ago) and should be completely rethought. I also think people overreact and believe "everything will break". And we have libraries and runtimes that only implement small parts of libc and the deployed apps that use them are running mostly fine for years.
My broader point was: shall we not start breaking away from all this legacy? Must we always rely on corporations to lead the charge?
But yes, I do of course agree with the only 24h a day thing. And likely nobody would want to pay for such a trail-blazing work anyway. Sad world.