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Comment Innovative OSes in 2015 (Score 2) 206

Nothing as far as a distro (or desktop environment) with 3D VR or AI comes to mind but there is innovation in OS going on. Not many have attempted to answer the OP, so here's my list. Others mentioned Qubes, Urbit, and Mirage.io, which reminded me of Nix OS and HaLVM.

Both innovative and seems daily-driver ready:
1. Qubes OS - https://www.qubes-os.org/ - Linux distro that runs a Xen hypervisor to contain every app (including Windows ones) away from the desktop environment
2. Haiku OS - https://www.haiku-os.org/ - Tiny (under 200MB installed), Non-Linux that is binary-compatible with BeOS, nice understated GUI that is bland but usable
3. ReactOS - http://reactos.org/ - Win32 compatible open source OS, very active development scene working toward full NT kernel ABI compatibility. Seems stable enough to be a daily driver but hardware support is lacking
4. PC-BSD & freeBSD 10 - http://www.pcbsd.org/ http://www.freebsd.org/ - PC-BSD is a desktop distro of freeBSD 10 built for user-friendliness with automatic ZFS snapshoting and a nice graphical package manager, freeBSD 10 has a completely new package manager (pkg-ng replaces the 'pkg' binary)
5. Nix OS - https://nixos.org/ - Linux distro with innovative package manager promising atomic upgrades & rollback.

Innovative server-exclusive (ie no GUI):
5. SmartOS - https://smartos.org/ - Solaris + KVM + Docker w/ full Dtrace support. Claims ZFS as an innovation? Joyent is running a cloud of it
6. CoreOS - https://coreos.com/ - Linux distro exclusively for large Docker deployments. developing a suite of Go tools for datacenter management.

Innovative, but not ready for desktop use:
7. Redox OS - http://www.redox-os.org/ - OS written in Rust (rust-lang), which guarantees a lot of memory-safety, screenshots of desktop in 'News' section
8. Contiki OS - http://www.contiki-os.org/ - Linux distro for IoT embedded devices that claims an innovative network stack
9. Urbit - http://urbit.org/docs/user/int... - *nix distro with exclusively web-based userland, invite-only at the moment, doesn't seem like it will have a UI but that each user is the dev of their own interface
10. Mirage.io - http://mirage.io/ - Develop each app and compile into a single-purpose kernel to be run on some hypervisor
11. HaLVM - https://github.com/GaloisInc/H... - The Haskell Ligthweight Virtual Machine - which runs just the GHC on Xen, another 'build uni-purpose VMs' system

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