It's funny you mention that because the first thing I thought when viewing this page was "is this a loading state? why is everything grey?".

Yeah, this is concerning. Although, if the system is architected well, accessibility features ought to be something that can be added as an extension.

What is a screen reader but something that can read the screen? It needs metadata from the GUI, which ought to be available if the system is correctly architected. It needs navigation order, which ought to be something that can be added later with a separate metadata channel (since navigation order should be completely decoupled from the implementation of the GUI).

The other topic of accessibility a la Steve Yegge: the entire system should be approachable to non-experts. That's already in their mission statement.

I think that the systems of the past have trained us to expect a lack of dynamism and configurability. There is some value to supporting existing screen-readers, like ORCA, since power users have scripts and whatnot. But my take is that if you provide a good mechanism that supports the primitive functionality and support generalized extensibility, then new and better systems can emerge organically. I don't use accessibility software, but I can't imagine it's perfect. It's probably ripe for its own reformation as well.

There are lots of systems that have tried to do something like the first quote. They're usually referred to as "semantic OSes", since the OS itself manages the capturing of semantic links.

I don't think anyone denies the current utility of AI. A big problem of the current OSes is that AI features are clumsily bolted on without proper context. If the entire system is designed from the ground up for AI and the model runs locally, perhaps many of the current issues will be diminished.

Same. I was super excited until I saw the AI stuff you pointed out. I'll have to read more about that. I like the idea of a new OS that isn't just a Linux clone, networking stack that is old school and takes computing in a different direction. I don't have a lot of need for the AI stuff outside of some occasional LLM stuff. I'd like to hear more from the authors on this.

Based on its /log page, it doesn't look like it has one yet. They're just now implementing the implementation language, R'.

It's prob a balance. Sure, C is king....but if you are starting from scratch...do you REALLY need it or could you design something even better? Maybe, maybe not.