I guess NeWS [0] is a likely candidate, as Mesa/Cedar[1] as well.

Many of these ideas also kind of exist in Windows, with COM/OLE/.NET/Powershell, or GNOME/KDE, although not in consistent way.

I always felt SOM was much better than COM, it even had metaclasses as concept.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4

Oh wow - I've never heard of NeWS before. That sounds like it was 20 years ahead of it's time and all the ideas had to be reinvented in Javascript to succeed. Thanks for the links.

Have you seen SerenityOS? https://serenityos.org/

"A graphical Unix-like operating system for desktop computers!

SerenityOS is a love letter to '90s user interfaces with a custom Unix-like core. It flatters with sincerity by stealing beautiful ideas from various other systems.

Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic of late-1990s productivity software and the power-user accessibility of late-2000s *nix.

This is a system by us, for us, based on the things we like."

Boots in a VM currently, but it has attracted a good community and people are working on getting it booting on hardware. It's been featured on HN several times: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

That looks like they've embraced the bad part of old operating systems (the aesthetics) and ignored the cool parts (everything is an object that you can communicate with).

Modern Windows with Powershell and COM does a better job IMHO.