Inspiring comment from Bane early this year, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5624912
If you need a yacht that can carry many people on the high seas through bad weather at speed, unix is solid. But there hasn't been a great racing dinghy since the 80s.
Maybe there is an demoscene/hacking tradition out there, waiting for to be discovered.
Consider the debates that we don't have:
* Hardware abstraction. Casual audio programming is harder now than it was twenty years ago. Also - why doesn't hardware self-describe?
* High-level languages. Chuck Moore's ideas of code bloat are on a totally different level to the mainstream. He's onto something.
* Protected memory. Does it matter on a machine designed for fun? How much more hackable could your OS be if you got rid of stuff like this?
Stability doesn't matter so much in fun systems. If you're in a dinghy and not capsizing, you're not sailing hard enough.
Thanks for the link, very interesting. Have you read Massalin's thesis on Synthesis OS (Partially Evaluated/JIT kernel objects) ? It's from the late 80s and very 'demo-scene' like (The author mentions efficient audio playing through his object based system).
http://valerieaurora.org/synthesis/SynthesisOS/
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SynthesisOs
http://lwn.net/Articles/270081/
The VPRI (vpri.org) has some interesting ideas with respect to your second bullet point.
Also, there was something about Arthur Whitney looking to build a stand-alone OS in/under K recently.
Found the reference. http://kparc.com/os.htm
Thanks - looks awesome. I particularly like his approach to HTML.