There's very little OS- or application-level support for it. Adding support would probably take more effort than convincing governments to abolish leap seconds.
Abolishing leap seconds is a terrible option. In a few thousand years' time, official time will have shifted noticeably from solar time, which is not acceptable to society. It's just code. We should draw up a transition plan to using TAI in computers.
In software engineering, batching changes is almost always good, because once you look at some code, migrate a database, profile a section, it's very convenient (economically speaking) to flush any similar task of reasonable size in the same area.
Leap seconds are the opposite; they try to spread the time changes as much as possible, adding single seconds whenever possible. If they went for minutes instead of seconds, it's possible that a leap minute would be added once per century (or less); entire generations of computer scientists would not have to deal with it and Google could come and go (for good) without ever having to shift their clocks.
Humans don't really care if you add a minute at midnight of new years eve, in fact, it could even be fun to countdown twice for the new year, but for computers it would be a massive saving of engineering effort.
You have valid points there. But in that case, I think using the existing system of time zones (i.e., leap hours) may be a better idea than introducing a somewhat new mechanism of leap minutes. Also because leap seconds are accelerating, in a few thousand years' time we'd have leap minutes every month, so it's better to postpone any problems even further into the future.
I'd rather have no leap seconds until the accumulated error reaches 30 minutes and then modify time zone offsets (which is already done twice a year anyway).
The "broadcast time" (and NTP time) doesn't need to have leap seconds at all, you could consider UTC as a timezone too.
You already need a table to convert between UTC and localtime, so why not use a table to convert between machine time and UTC too?
http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/right+gps.html
