Minix have always fascinated me: how it's more modular, smaller, safer and even self-healing. It makes sense to think those are qualities all systems should have, embedded or not.

I wonder if the more popular desktop OSes are ever going to change their monolithic architectures into something similar and adopt these ideas. At this point it seems unlikely because it's all about speed and flashy features, not so much reliability and modularity.

It would be a huge amount of work to change the underlying architecture of some existing million-lines-of-code monster - and that costs a lot of money - but the benefits of having a microkernel could also outweigh that in the future.