I'm curious as to your background if you consider any of the things mentioned in the articles as "trivial" changes. Have you worked in systems development before?
I similarly question your definition of "modest". The first one alone is incredibly radical, and has been tried several times in the past but people keep asking for hierarchical file systems. It's far from modest.
1. How do you propose users organize things?
2. Already exists today with electron and webview. What would you propose an OS provide here? Many apps you use today on macOS are web apps within a native context.
3. This is already growing on macOS with features like continuity handofd, universal control, being able to run mobile apps on desktop, iCloud sync of projects etc.. Each year they've clearly moved towards unifying things.
If these are what you consider modest though, I fear what you consider radical without throwing out decades of learned user interaction in the process
I’m not using “trivial” as a measure of ease of back-end implementation, but rather of how it actually changes user experience and productivity. There is no limit to how hard it can become to implement trivial changes behind the scenes; it would be silly to ignore or downplay the ossification of desktop OS capability just because software developers continue to expend more and more effort to make smaller and smaller improvements.
My reading of your comment is that you aren’t actually interested in thinking about non-trivial changes here. “Didn’t you know people have tried eliminating folder systems before? It’s hard and hasn’t succeeded yet” is obvious and does not seriously engage with the possibility. (“Didn’t you know people have been attempting to make stylus input work for decades without success?”) Likewise, the fact that web apps can be disguised as native apps is not the same thing as eliminating the distinction at the user level, and I don’t think you would have conflated these if you were really interested in it.
So I don’t think it will be productive to continue this conversation.
Again, that's why I'm delineating between scale and complexity. Trivial implies complexity, but you seem to keep going back to scale of the change.
Saying something is trivial, by definition, implies its a simple change. Nothing mentioned so far is simple. None of your suggestions were modest.
I understand you're using the word according to how you think of it, but I'm trying to point out that you're incorrect, and that many of the things you say are modest are not so.
You're actively down playing the amount of work and it either feels disingenuous to make your point, or divorced from the reality of implementation.
Many of the things mentioned in the article aren't trivial. They may be smaller in scope, but size (large / small) are different than complexity.
You can take a look at what's new in Ventura https://www.apple.com/macos/macos-ventura-preview/features/ but that's not even getting into the under pinnings.
Similarly Microsoft made fairly significant changes to Windows between 10 and 11, and several times to 10 within its life cycle.
Unless you're talking purely visual design, in which case what kind of changes would you expect without upending people's workflow?