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Syllable
All of the operating systems listed so far are clones of old proprietary systems. The next one is not. Syllable began life as AtheOS, a graphical OS that itself started life as an AROS clone. AtheOS was the work of a single developer as a hobby project. Because one of the goals of the project was to teach the author about OS design, and to create his own vision of what an OS should be, he was reluctant to accept patches from the community.
In 2002, two years after development of AtheOS had effectively ended, it was forked to produce Syllable. As AtheOS grew, it became more similar to BeOS than the AROS, although retained its own unique flavor.
One of the biggest benefits AtheOS had over BeOS was the fact that Kurt Skauen (the original author of AtheOS) ported KHTML over and created ABrowse. When BeOS was still stuck with the antique NetPositive browser (one that predated even frames), AtheOS had a relatively modern one. Modern BeOS clones tend to use Firefox, but this has the disadvantage that it doesn’t feel particularly integrated with the rest of the desktop.
Syllable’s big advantage over many other operating systems is that it has no legacy to support. No concessions must be made to support legacy Mac, Windows, BeOS, or AROS applications. This is a two-edged sword, because it means that there is no existing software library for Syllable. This is not as bad as it might seem; beneath the GUI, Syllable supports a large subset of POSIX, and so much non-GUI Free Software can be easily ported. GUI applications with a clean abstraction layer are relatively easy to port, although they require a lot more than a straight recompile.
Under the hood, Syllable is a modern design. The filesystem is heavily inspired by that of BeOS, the kernel supports all of the expected features (SMP, protected memory, multithreading, and more), and the GUI is built along object oriented lines in C++.