I've been looking through the source code for TempleOS and playing with it in a VM for awhile now.
I know that Terry Davis has his vision where he feels that it has to be 640x480 and non-networked because God or something told him that was the best, but I was curious the amount of work that would be required to add a few more modern OS. I think that if it had networking and a few other features here and there, it might be a genuinely usable OS.
So that's my question: Has anyone here considered forking the code and trying to make something useful for modern applications?
Really tightly integrated designs eventually get to the point where there's almost nothing to change... No word could be swapped, no color could be different, because the each design choice relies on the last. Many designers use that as a measure of when something is ready. When you really apply iterative design practices, you add and take away and add and take away, and you eventually end up with an extremely lightweight design that is very strong, but where every piece of the whole is extremely important. Apple strives for this.
I'm not saying TempleOS is there, but that's the kind of design project it is, and that's where it's headed. That's what makes it "holy"... It's not perfect but it's pointed at perfection and it aims to get there. Linus, in contrast, doesn't care if Linux is perfect. He wants to make something that's useful and is willing to make a mess if it helps people get their work done.