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Thrilled Andreas has managed to receive enough community support to be able to take this big step and is able to focus on Serenity OS fulltime.
SerenityOS is an inspiring from scratch grassroots OS effort which plans to build the entire POSIX OS, Kernel and core Apps from scratch, one of the Apps their is their LibWeb browser engine complete with their own LibJS JS VM which already passes the ECMAScript test suite. One of its USPs is that the entire OS is contained within its single source tree where anyone can make changes to its code-base and instantly reboot the OS in seconds with the changes, never seen this done for an OS before, the turn around time allows for some impressive dev iteration speed.
A good preview of this hackability is in his Diablo port, whether it's missing C++ APIs, unsupported lang features, missing SDL port impl, toggling kernel features - it all gets done in 1 sit down session to produce a shiny new Diablo port:
https://youtu.be/ZOzZ8R4gphE
Andreas videos on developing LibWeb/LibJS is one of the best resources I've found explaining how to implement a multi-process web browser, e.g. in this video he goes through the HTML Specs which have enough info in them to develop a HTML spec parser whose behavior is the same across all browser engines:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZdKlyXV2vw
It's been awesome to see LibWeb/LibJS evolve over time, every time he sits down it gets a bit more capable. Typically it's to implement features for rendering a different website. Here's a nice example where LibWeb gains missing JS APIs (including eval) to render "Canvas Cycle" JS demos:
https://youtu.be/b3a5V45LLss which he optimizes in his next video https://youtu.be/tGmaO8agfY4
With full control over the entire OS, Kernel, GUI, etc. It's got lots of tightly integrated innovative features like its GUI GML language for creating native UIs where he creates a GML Playground in this video https://youtu.be/1QYBvTy9QKE then uses it to be build the OS's new Font UI Picker dialog in the next https://youtu.be/Fa9SwYfH2NI which is now so sophisticated that the WidgetGallery has been converted to using it https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/5741
Since Andreas is so productive he's the only developer who I watch live coding which makes for an inspirational background score, his commentary explaining his thoughts whilst he codes is so informative that they're basically HowTo's on how to implement each OS/App/Browser feature.
Speaking of "cheaper boards" :
http://collapseos.org/
I'm somewhat skeptical of the usefulness of 16 and 32 bit software : 8-bit is simple and can do ASCII, sRGB... while 64-bit is enough for the foreseeable future, but in-between ? You're just hampering yourself for dubious gains...