Technology

There were plenty of alternative graphic shells for DOS, too.

For me it's interesting to imagine what if a multi-user memory protected yadda-yadda serious system replaced DOS, but preserved the modularity and interoperability of components, so that people would still use different graphic shells, different memory compressors\swappers and so on, and then the PC world would be much more interesting today.

That's what, only in the sense of desktop shells, Unix-likes have raising them above Windows, or at least have until X11 dies. I think that XLibre person, despite their mental instability and wish to seek conflicts, was right to fork it and it's a good call and that XLibre project will live on. Because yes, RedHat had a policy for X11 stagnating and being deprecated, and they imposed it on the Xorg project itself. I think we'll see that, oh wonder, X11's modular architecture (in the sense of extensions too) will prove better project-wise than Wayland's. Even with legacy, technical debt, obsolete paradigm, all those things people like to mention. This happened too late to kill Wayland, but not too late to save X.

Which is BTW why this meeting involving Dave Cutler is cool again. See, NT is in its architecture more modular than Linux.

I doubt they are going to do any project, but in case they are - would be cool if it were a third OS in the VMS and NT row. Supporting Linux ABI and drivers, but maybe even allowing to use Windows NT device drivers. How cool would that be.

OK, that's what's called "пикейный жилет" in Russian, utterly useless talk of the kitchen\taxi kind.