This is an amazing piece of work, but it's clearly a labor of love: this isn't going to have any real-world use any time soon.

Where operating systems are headed is more towards security (process isolation, bulletproof input etc), not lightweight GUIs on top of thin kernels like this.

Are there any passion (or other) projects that explore this? I know about Qubes, but that's more like a heavy layer on top of a heavy duty GUI, on top of a Linux kernel.