Here <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/not-a-linux-distro-review-serenityos-is-a-unix-y-love-letter-to-the-90s/> is a review of SerenityOS, a complete open-source POSIXy OS that does not use any GNU, Linux or BSD code. The review spends a lot of time on the GUI, which is consciously designed around a 1990s aesthetic. As usual, this sort of thing leaves me wondering “you could implement that whole look and feel on top of a Linux kernel, so why make your own?”. Then, further down, we get to this: Some of the paradigm shifts Kling and fellow contributors have introduced are neither weird nor trivial, though. SerenityOS's kernel, for example, exposes its internals as JSON rather than unstructured text. System utilities consuming kernel information therefore have a much simpler time of formatting it for display and/or internal decisions. Aha! Now there is something which could very well have a point. Though the Linux approach is to have the information exposed in these kernel pseudo-files in a simple (not unstructured!) text format that is both easy to parse and also somewhat comprehensible to a human viewer (which is harder to say of JSON). If you want to pass around object streams in a Linux command line, jq <https://github.com/stedolan/jq> is available as a standard Debian package, for doing precisely this sort of manipulation of JSON-formatted data. (Is that someone in Microsoft’s PowerShell group saying “I told you so!” ... ?)