I'm wondering if anyone else here thinks that the time is ripe for a competitor to Mac OS X given Apple's missteps regarding the Mac as of late? I'm in the market for a new laptop to replace my dead 2013 MacBook Air, and I'm not pleased with any of Apple's laptop offerings at this time. I've been thinking about buying a ThinkPad 480 or HP EliteBook 830 G5, but this will mean transitioning to Windows 10 or Linux, which are still a step or two down from Mac OS X for me.<p>I wish there were an workstation-focused operating system out there that had the polish of Mac OS X but can run on a wide range of PCs. Since the demise of BeOS there hasn't been any new commercial operating systems for personal computers; it's just Windows, Mac OS X, or commercial Linux distributions. Personally it should be inspired by some of the best ideas of computing, ideas that were ahead of their time back when they first appeared but may be successful today if reimplemented and reintroduced the right way. I'm talking about some of the ideas of Smalltalk that didn't make its way into contemporary GUIs. I'm talking about Lisp machines such as the ones Symbolics made that ran the Genera environment. Take the ideas of such systems, then add something like Apple's OpenDoc to encourage the construction of small, composable GUI tools that developers could write, and then use tried-and-true UI guidelines like those from the Mac OS 8 era, and we would have an operating system that is extensible, has a consistent user interface conforming to tried-and-true guidelines, and supports programmable GUI workflows while also supporting the command line via some sort of REPL.