Computers always have this "transition" period where the older technologies are slowly phased out for the newer ones: PCI-Express for AGP and PCI, USB and FireWire for PS/2 and serial ports, DVI for VGA connections etc.

My idea is that you combine a legacy-free set of hardware: just a simple motherboard and processor, USB and FireWire (sorry: "IEEE 1394") buses, DVI output, SP/DIF output and a Gigabit Ethernet port. And, of course, a standard AC power plug.

The OS would only work with these "newer" technologies, most of which are currently in acceptance already. The difference between this OS and say the *nix and *BSD world is that it has a very limited scope of hardware to support. This would mean less time spent on writing and optimizing 1000s of different drivers, more time writing and making the actual OS useful.

I suppose "don't reinvent the wheel" comes into play quite a lot here. But... you could base the OS around one of the stable, free kernels, such as Linux or one of the BSDs, and then bundle together a select few open source applications.

Essentially, it's a very minimalist computer running a highly-modified, easy-to-use version of BSD or *nix. Applications such as Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, The GIMP, VideoLAN and Gaim could be included.

I think my concept might appear pretty vague, but it's quite clear up here. *points to head*