What are you looking for to distinguish from a unix like system?
At what level of the stack are you looking for things to stand apart?
Consider that for many folks today, the Operating System interface is not much more than an HTTP/S socket. Where Unix was "everything is a file", today it's, almost, "everything is a POST" (I appreciate this is a broad brush).
At this level, the underlying OS is mostly shrouded.
The OS doesn't determine the user interface. We conflate the two, but that's not necessary. A unix system would happily accommodate a Window 3.1 style interface, if that's what you wanted.
Those in the field will kibitz about how one "serialized object" protocol is better/worse than the other. But, in the end, most of it doesn't really matter. Not at a human scale.
Sure, when you have half the planet using your services, and you measure your computer power in hectares, and power budget in Megawatts, small gains are big gains.
But however we, say, talk to a printer? How the handshake is managed before we dump a 20MB photo into it, doesn't really matter so much.
With our trend of just wrapping execution contexts into more and more context wrappers (threads in processes in containers in vms), there's so many layers to penetrate, we've not quite given up on the security of kernels, but they're certainly less important. Do we really need something like a capability system anymore?
for most people, the browser is the platform.
for a somewhat different "most", the phone is the platform.
none of those people care whether it's apache or nginx or something else handling the socket, or what kind of socket it is, or how app routing works, or how that app accesses storage, allocates RAM, etc.
i want an operating system fine tuned for performance from the ground up, needs to be atleast 10x faster than all the current operating systems. its kernel needs to be written from scratch keeping only modern hardware post 2015 in mind. It should have minimal bloat and absolutely spectacular benchmarks compared to the rest of all of them
If we follow your reasoning, then why have different programming languages?
Why are people still spending time making new programming languages?
We already have C. It built UNIX, databases, games.
Nobody cares what something is coded in.
Why do we have more than one database?
In fact just storing data in the file system was more than sufficient
Nobody cares how data is stored.
The answer is that they are all crucially important and we still have engineers
and creators who want to innovate and push the borders of what is possible.
invent new and improved ways to accomplish what we are doing and extend what
we will be able to do.
