I've always been drawn to the idea of a truly personal computing experience, being able to design a system that I understand inside and out and have complete mastery over, but without knowledge of OS and low-level programming, I assumed this was beyond my reach. But looking at unikernel technologies such as MirageOS, it seems I should be able to write an OCaml program that "just werks" on any hardware that supports virtualization.
Sure, it'll never be as functional and feature-filled as a commercial laptop, but I'm thinking I could create a reasonable "dumb machine" that supports some basic tasks I'd like to do without all the bloat and distraction that modern OS's provide. Just curious if any of you here are familiar with unikernels and have any experience using them. Is there potential to use them to create truly customizable and personalized systems?