You make a good point about dbus. It is sooooort of similar if you squint. But I think both your points are correct. I feel like the buy-in factor is probably the big one - I think if there was lots of buy in the tooling would probably get easier.

How did I not think of datatypes? Yeah, omg they were do great. I'll never forget my amazement when I installed one (I think for jpeg) and now just everything supported jpeg.

I think IIRC beos did something similar to that.

Oh yeah I've seen AROS, but like you I haven't actually fired it up in a long time. The last time I did it was "Amiga Research Operating System".

I just noticed on their wikipedia:

  there is also an ARM port for the Raspberry Pi series

That sounds like a good excuse to break out one of these pis I have sitting around!