Must admit, my first parse of the thread subject had me thinking of alternatives to abox and even completely alternate OSes like HaikuOS...

Speaking of memory above 1.5GB being used a ramdisk, how about a reintroduction of soft resets? Remember how classic Amigas could boot from a recoverable ramdisk? I think the device was called RAD: Even without booting from memory, it'd be nice to have a reset option that didn't go all the way back to open firmware.