Why General-Purpose Operating Systems Become Redundant in Adaptive Computing Environments

General-purpose operating systems (GPOS) were designed for static hardware, predictable workloads, and user-initiated task execution. In adaptive computing environments—characterized by continuous context inference, distributed execution, and ephemeral computation—these assumptions no longer hold. This paper argues that the traditional operating system becomes an unnecessary abstraction layer, introducing latency, rigidity, and state persistence conflicts that undermine adaptive behavior. We demonstrate that core OS functions such as scheduling, boot-time initialization, and state management are increasingly externalized to environment-aware orchestration layers, rendering the monolithic OS model structurally redundant.