They're of course not a desktop option at all, but there's also some very interesting work happening with unikernels, which are really only recently a viable op

They're of course not a desktop option at all, but there's also some very interesting work happening with unikernels, which are really only recently a viable option now that Xen can present a unified hardware layer, instead of the endless treadmill of specific drivers. I've been getting into OpenMirage [1] quite a bit recently, largely due to the energy of the team [2], but also looked a bit at HalVM [3]. I definitely recommend [2] for anyone interested in plausible ideas of what the one of the next generations of VM/apps might look like. [1] http://www.openmirage.org/ http://www.openmirage.org/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjonFD-2ATo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjonFD-2ATo or http://www.se-radio.net/2014/05/episode-204-anil-madhavapeddy-on-the-mirage-cloud-operating-system-and-the-ocaml-language/ http://www.se-radio.net/2014/05/episode-204-anil-madhavapedd... (audio only) [3] https://github.com/GaloisInc/HaLVM https://github.com/GaloisInc/HaLVM