That is my biggest argument against commercial Operating systems, keep the OS free and charge for drivers and applications.
Here, here. My impression is that the OS itself is a fairly small and simple part of the whole system. It's the shell, interface, and desktop that has all the complicated stuff, in respective, increasing complexity.
It should be noted that DLL hell was caused by a coding style, not a technology. The idea of shared libraries was a good one back when machines were largely proprietary, and contained many applications from the same vendor (like MS). These days, you have hundreds of background tasks running simultaniously, and hardware is cheap. Getting that many vendors to coexist is impossible. You might as well let them manage their own libraries, and just shut 'em down if they do something stupid (and tell the user WHY!)
Technically, you should be able to use an older Windows DLL simply by having it in the same folder as the application, which overrides the new version in the system folder. Of course, MS doesn't like this.
My favorite thing about Amiga and Mac software is the fact it doesn't have to be installed, put tons of files in the system folder, or be put in a specific place. Just copy it to the hard drive and run it wherever you want. Lots of Amiga and Mac apps run right from removable disks without any installation required. Good system security might be more difficult to implement that way, but for a single user system that's the best way to make software.
Besides, sharing files these days isn't really meant for libraries, anymore. If an application needs outside resources, they are usually copied seperately by a 3rd party installer and run like applications or over TCP/IP, like media players, database servers, and other background tasks.
