I have a similar vision as yours. I wish we had a computing environment today that was a refinement of the Smalltalk and Lisp machine environments of the 1980s

I have a similar vision as yours. I wish we had a computing environment today that was a refinement of the Smalltalk and Lisp machine environments of the 1980s, where there was no distinction between user and programmer and where everything is built up from objects. I dream of component-based software as opposed to monolithic applications. I dream of the day where personal computing is once again about the user having complete control and flexibility over the computing environment. I also agree with you regarding the funding landscape. Building even a clone of Symbolics' Genera operating system from the 1980s will be a major engineering effort. Academia might not the best venue since academia promotes research, not product building, though I could foresee a professor taking inspiration from Andrew Tanenbaum's Minix project and creating a Lisp- or Smalltalk-based operating system for teaching purposes and to encourage the study of non-Unix operating system designs, as systems research currently (e.g., ACM SIGOPS, USENIX) is heavily Unix-dominated and has been for decades. Regarding startups, the last VC-backed operating system-based startup that I could think of is Be, Inc. from the 1990s, which failed to be a commercial success since Be lost against NeXT during Apple's quest for a classic Mac OS replacement in 1996, and since Be faced major hurdles with getting OEMs to ship PCs with BeOS preinstalled due to agreements Microsoft made with top-selling PC companies to encourage the proliferation of Windows. Every other built-from-the-ground-up OS built since then has either been a research project (Microsoft Research's Singularity, the L4 microkernel) or backed by a large company with huge pockets (Google's Fuchsia). Interestingly enough, while I believe the FOSS community would benefit the most from a Smalltalk- or Lisp-based operating system since I believe component-based software design is more amenable to the economics of FOSS development than the development of large applications, I also agree with you regarding why the FOSS community gravitated around Unix; RMS after all was a Lisp hacker who worked at MIT yet decided to embark on GNU instead of creating a free Lisp OS. It's a hard question, and a question I'm interested in since I'd love to work on such an operating system and I feel there's a need for it, but I have bills to pay.