It seems the 2 biggest hurdles of creating a new OS (aside from designing and actually writing the damn thing) is software support and driver support...

Silly idea, but how about a "super" terminal OS... that does a few primary things:

1. Responsive clients for various UIs (X, VNC, RDP, SSH, Powershell, etc.) - Having a full UI to use my smart phone would be awesome. 2. Run VMs (which can run docker, etc.) 3. Uses some mechanism (wave hands here) on the remote machines to facilitate storage, computation?, graphics, audio, clipboard and printing on the local terminal. 4. Strong support for a few devices. Pick a few network cards and graphic cards to support, perhaps a few other basics, and leave it at that...

I know it would still take years of writing a LOT of code, but this could reduce the lack of software support. Drivers are still a sticky issue...

(Yeah, like I said, a silly idea!)