Essence: A desktop OS built from scratch, for control and simplicity
This is really, really significant imo. The idea of system wide tabs has been in the back of my head for a while, as well as moving away from the linux kernel. I've messed around with it a bit and I'm very impressed.<p>Starting from scratch is awesome, and I'm firmly in the group that we should not strive for backwards compatibility at this stage, and instead aim to maximize intuitiveness for both developers and users.