It looks dead. I think they chose the wrong approach in lots of ways, but it wasn't that far from a JS (and Typescript) based OS on top of Linux that is actually a good idea.

ChromeOS is kind of close to what I'd want, if you could remove Google from it. (I actually like ChromeOS, nearly perfect for my kid's computer)

Firefox OS was also kind of close, but they missed in a lot of ways.

Here are the features of some OS I wish existed:

Open source and not primarily controlled by Apple or Google or Microsoft of Facebook or whatever.

JS and Typescript are essentially native and are the primary ways of building apps, but WASM would be available if you need machine code.

The same JS engine runs in the browser as for running applications. The same rendering engine works inside the browser and to render "native" apps that do any drawing to the screen. Preferably, you could choose to run on one of several browser engines

Most apps that run as native apps can, without much extra work, run as web apps, and vice versa.

The UI isn't built on a framework that might fall in popularity. So not React or Angular or Vue or whatever. If people want to use those in their apps, they are there, but core stuff for the UI avoids relying on them.

That's all I can think of for now. Beyond "design it really, really well and make a slick feeling but non-limiting front end experience." Which is hard.

(sorry to those with unbridled hate for JS and even Typescript)

We’ve seen how Electron performs. The only reason VSC doesn’t totally suck is because a lot of it is still native code. I can’t even imagine how crappy it would be building an entire OS out of that stuff.

And you’re never going to escape the needs for another systems language because unless you find a way of writing non-memory managed code with pointers and inlined assembly in JavaScript, that language simply isn’t going to cut it. And on top of that you’d need a compiler that can compile machine code just to bootstrap node in the first place.

I’m all for experimental operating systems but there’s a reason systems languages differ in design to web scripting languages and really we should be using the languages that suit each domain the best rather than simply putting JavaScript everywhere because we are too lazy to learn anything else.