The right way to tame complexity is not that much of a hassle. This is why virtualization and containers have been so successful. Make the OS immutable by converting into a nested Russian doll of OSes with specific instances being mutable but also disposable.
It’s ugly in its own way but it has the virtue of not exchanging one ugly complexity tax (OS rot and manual admin) with another (a complicated “manager” that wants to get in the way).
I kind of dig the idea of a unikernel world where there's just a hypervisor and applications running directly on top of it shipping only the bits of the OS they need.
It’s ugly in its own way but it has the virtue of not exchanging one ugly complexity tax (OS rot and manual admin) with another (a complicated “manager” that wants to get in the way).