I think this is an impressive achievement, and certainly something I could never do. But I'm a little disappointed in the state of desktop operating systems these days. I don't see any innovation. Every OS is just splashing chrome on the same WIMP paradigm that's been available to consumers for 35 years.

Maybe I'm looking for the equivalent of a flying car, but I wish someone would come up with an OS, or even just an OS feature that makes people say "wow!"

Is there a college lab or a research department or some other place where people are trying really different things?

At the risk of sounding inflammatory (which is not my intention), what I'd like to see is the FP and RIIR crowds getting their hands dirty and write a hobby OS like this up to this level in their language of choice. If that means they need to assemble a stable ABI/API that other programmers can build against, then that's the challenge.

C/C++ programmers have been building their own hobby OS's non-stop since Linux came out. There's lots of example code out there for initializing the bare metal, writing bootloaders, task switching, controlling the MMU there for those languages. I even got a certain distance myself nearly 20 years ago, and I'm a complete hack. I only gave up because I never figured out how to initialize VESA graphics from protected mode, and I sure as hell didn't want do it with 16-bit code from the bootloader.

We all know what a disaster area C/C++ are, the number of CVE's we see in the Linux kernel and userland because of this, etc etc, we hear about it every day on HN. So I personally like to see some of those people put their money where their mouth is. I think that would be an innovation.