Comment by andreww591

It's not completely "legacy-free", nor is it purely capability-oriented, but I'm writing a QNX-like OS (https://gitlab.com/uxrt/uxrt-toplevel) based on a kernel forked from seL4 with a preference for servers written in safer languages. Even though it is going to be fairly Unix-like it will diverge from conventional Unix in a number of ways and either discard or demote quite a few legacy Unix features. For example, there will be no support for reversion to the traditional Unix security model in the core OS, with the base VFS implementing a security model based on a mix of per-process ACLs and capability transfers, and on top of that there will be a role-based access control model (there will be a fakeroot-type compatibility layer that simulates traditional Unix security within an environment constrained by the native security model). I don't think there's a good way to make a purely capability-oriented general-purpose OS since as soon as you have a way to look up files by human-readable names instead of capabilities your OS is no longer purely capability-oriented.

IMO most of the issues with typical Unix-like OSes are more due to specific outdated architectural features rather than the Unix API or shell environment. A lot of what could be done with a completely new OS could instead be done by designing a Unix-like OS for extensibility by reducing the core API down to a small set of file calls that act as an IPC transport layer and name service and then building everything on top of that, building object-oriented wrapper libraries on top of the filesystem, and reimplementing the traditional Unix APIs outside the core filesystem ones on top of the newer APIs. Existing applications could be ported to such a system incrementally rather than having to do everything all at once or relegate them to some kind of limited "penalty box" compatibility layer (and any binary compatibility layer for Linux or other conventional Unices would integrate better into such a system than into something completely new).