There is tons of old research that just hasn't been put in practice. There are 3 major desktop OSes, and they all adopt 80's view on security i.e. security is mainly about separating users and not necessarily about separating applications.
a) I'd like all applications to be run in sandboxes. That way you don't have to care if you application has malware or its processes got hacked. You have that in iOS I believe (but iOS has other problems), but to various degrees it's been done in solaris and freebsd, probably can be hacked in linux but no major distro has it as a precooked solution.
b) Have OS written in memory safe language. Microsoft got Singularity, I have no idea why that never saw the light of day. That thing could kill Linux on a large portion of the server market. Hopefully we will get something written in Rust now.
a) I'd like all applications to be run in sandboxes. That way you don't have to care if you application has malware or its processes got hacked. You have that in iOS I believe (but iOS has other problems), but to various degrees it's been done in solaris and freebsd, probably can be hacked in linux but no major distro has it as a precooked solution.
b) Have OS written in memory safe language. Microsoft got Singularity, I have no idea why that never saw the light of day. That thing could kill Linux on a large portion of the server market. Hopefully we will get something written in Rust now.