I've always wondered why a new open-source OS has not arisen to claim the mantle of UNIX / Linux. There are so many ancient design decisions, piled up upon each other, which spawn millions of man-hours of frustration. It continues perhaps because of its esoteric nature. People don't want to throw away all the weird stuff they've learnt.
Maybe a parallel system needs to be implemented, like how OS X originally had a Classic OS 9 system running alongside. Once everyone had come to OS X, the classic environment was dropped.
