[voldacar]

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy"

An OS facilitates communication between programs running on a computer. Unix lets those programs communicate by sending characters of text to each other. You could just as easily imagine an OS that lets them communicate by sending images, audio/video, 3d models, etc. An OS can be way more than what you think it is. To detox your brain from this unix worldview, spend some time in a VM and play around with amigaOS or opengenera. Those were actual coherent OSes with an actual view of what a computer should be and how it should behave. Unix isn't.

> reimagining of the whole standard application package which seems a much larger project than "merely" an OS.

By OS, I don't mean kernel. I mean the base set of software that lets you interact with your computer and do interesting stuff with it.