All true, of course, but a "clean slate" OS could simply be Windows. The Window OS "on paper" is not bad. Its nominal capabilities are pretty good and when it works it is pretty decently usable. The problem is quality control, with lots of old code and new code probably in conflict.
So if they took the official internal specifications (including the "secret" APIs) for Windows and had a team of good programmers write it from scratch, they could, at least in theory, get rid of the old bugs. However, there are a couple of problems with this idea. One is that new code brings along new bugs, and it would need a lot of debugging before it was safe to use. Two is that it would take too long -- isn't the WINE project, to implement the Windows API with clean code on Linux, somewhere around the Win2000 stage now, after maybe 20 years?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
