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Recommendation for non-DOS/Unix open source OS outside x86/X64

44 pointsposted 11 days ago

Item id: 43452491

51 Comments

dlcarrier

11 days ago

There's RISC OS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_OS

It was written for the Acorn computers that were the original use of the ARM architecture. It's still around and is pretty lean, despite being complete with a GUI and network capabilities.

xet7

9 days ago

RISC OS Direct has modern webbrowser, Iris:

https://www.riscosdev.com/direct/

mepian

11 days ago

The MIT Lisp machine system: https://tumbleweed.nu/lm-3/

Mezzano, a much more recent OS written in Common Lisp that runs on Arm rather than special hardware: https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano

andsoitis

9 days ago

Inferno - https://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/

Description from Wikipedia: “Inferno is a distributed operating system started at Bell Labs and now developed and maintained by Vita Nuova Holdings as free software under the MIT License. Inferno was based on the experience gained with Plan 9 from Bell Labs, and the further research of Bell Labs into operating systems, languages, on-the-fly compilers, graphics, security, networking and portability.”

wormius

9 days ago

Plan 9 - one version of which is 9front, which says this:

"Multiple installation media are provided for PC, Raspberry Pi, MNT Reform, and QEMU. For PC, burn an .iso file to CD, or dd it directly to USB media. For Raspberry Pi or MNT Reform, dd an .img file directly to sdcard.

The pi.img file can be used for Raspberry Pi 1, 2, and 3. The pi3.img file can be used for Raspberry Pi 3 and 4.

QEMU images are provided in QCOW2 format."

https://9front.org/releases/

rewgs

9 days ago

OP said non-Unix. I'd say that the successor to Unix is Unix-y enough to not qualify for this thread.

opless

9 days ago

It’s not as unix-y as you think.

Go try it

bandie91

8 days ago

AFAIA plan9 takes the original unix ideas further than Unix or its descendents. in this light, plan9 is more unixy than unix.

opless

8 days ago

In two aspects only

1. Everything is a file. 2. A command does only one thing well

There's no init, fstab, etc etc etc. Very little of your Unix muscle memory will work.

rewgs

8 days ago

I've used it plenty ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It's an odd duck and very interesting but the Unix roots are still clear IMO.

snvzz

11 days ago

There's Niklaus Wirth's Oberon[0].

0. https://www.projectoberon.net/

pajko

9 days ago

RISC-V, ARM in development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AROS_Research_Operating_System

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MorphOS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS_4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos

2809

9 days ago

[flagged]

dredmorbius

8 days ago

Explain?

2809

8 days ago

I'm not going to go into it but you can look up most of the information about this dating back 25 years. As someone who was around at the time in that community, and was in certain locations of interest at the time, its best to avoid and use the public projects like AROS etc.

dredmorbius

8 days ago

Nonpayment issues, or something else?

<https://www.amiga-news.de/de/news/AN-2004-11-00063-DE.html>

I'd appreciate if you could link to something definite rather than play 20 questions over vague insinuations.

jdougan

9 days ago

There have been a number of passes at embedded Smalltalks. Eg. https://hackaday.com/2020/07/12/making-smalltalk-on-a-raspbe...

Back in the day, Tek oscilloscopes ran ST on the metal.

lboc

9 days ago

Are we to assume you want it to run on actual hardware? I imagine there are a number of OSes that qualify if emulation is acceptable. One I like:

http://www.vm370.org/

Full S/370 assembler source included.

rbanffy

8 days ago

Indeed. Very alien to Unix users. Also, the idea of virtual machine is totally different from what we currently use in KVM.

evanjrowley

11 days ago

Technically you can run Redox-OS on a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ (ARM), but it still works best on x86_64: https://doc.redox-os.org/book/raspi.html

If you decide you miss DOS, then you can also use the DOS emulator available on Redox-OS. It's not Linux but there are some linux-inspired stuff there, including apps from the Cosmic desktop environment. Both announced here: https://www.redox-os.org/news/release-0.9.0/

anta40

11 days ago

"We are not a Linux/BSD clone, or POSIX-compliant..."

and

"It should be able to run most Linux/BSD programs with minimal modifications"

Hmm weird. Will give it a try, anyway.

raggi

9 days ago

https://fuchsia.dev/

slicktux

9 days ago

XINU (Xinu Is not UNIX) OS…good book on it too for Operating System design!

https://xinu.cs.purdue.edu/

notorandit

9 days ago

Exactly like xv6, Xinu is rather unix-ish. Still very very interesting to study.

https://github.com/mit-pdos/xv6-riscv

https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2024/

toast0

8 days ago

I've got a hobby OS that's currently x86 32-bit only. amd64 and arm64 are on my roadmap, but if all goes well, it's going to be the same experience on all three platforms, so arm64 won't be anymore exciting than x86 32-bit. Other than, you could run it on a raspberry pi or maybe an arm apple.

I imagine most hobby OSes are looking at arm support vs adding something else, and arm support is going to be more fiddly and have less to show for it. I haven't found much time to work on mine lately, but other things are way more important like getting my virtio-net driver and the v86 virtio-net device to work together; having networking in https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=crazierl would be really neat. Running on a pi would be neat too, but a browser demo is way more accessible.

mappu

9 days ago

ToaruOS has an ARMv8 port: https://github.com/klange/toaruos and Serenity has an ARM and RISC-V ports: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity ; although I think you would call them Unix-like.

Haiku has tier-2 ports to ARM, RISC-V, and SPARC: https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/building/port_status

ReactOS has an ARM32 port but the ARM64 one is not usable yet.

Skift apparently runs on ARM and RISC-V: https://skiftos.org/

yann-gael

11 days ago

You could try MorphOS or AROS, which turn your (old) Mac and others into Amigas

Amlal

11 days ago

I'm surprised that nobody has talked about HaikuOS, I used to daily drive for a while before returning to Linux or OS X, depending on what I do.

bauruine

9 days ago

>Supported platforms: x86, 32-bit and 64-bit

Because it's not relate to the question.

Edit: Sorry they support other platforms. See next comment.

oidar

9 days ago

https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/building/port_status

bauruine

9 days ago

Thanks I haven't seen that. I take it all back. Maybe they could add a note on their download page.

https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta5/

paxcoder

9 days ago

[dead]

LargoLasskhyfv

11 days ago

Sculpt yourself some https://genode.org/

DrNosferatu

8 days ago

I see many OSes here that are missing some lengthy, but apparently not extremely complicated - and quite well defined - parts / components / modules.

I wonder if letting loose a coding LLM on them with clear goals and a feedback loop, could bring them to (at least near) completion?

BearOso

8 days ago

Probably not helpfully. There isn't much like this to be found in any training data. The required code would be too novel, and I predict an LLM would hallucinate a good 2/3.

DrNosferatu

8 days ago

Wine improvement could be aided with LLMs by monitoring the output of a windows VM running and see what exactly to display, and what exactly to have in working (not program) RAM.

Same goes for perfect OpenSource Office with MSOffice compatibility: MSOffice is running on Windows is continuously monitored for reference, showing exactly what needs to be outputted. Have this in a feedback and reinforcement loop.

DrNosferatu

8 days ago

My point is to ask the LLM to implement the well-defined design documents. And tests for verification.

johnklos

8 days ago

TOPS on old PDP hardware (or an emulator) is quite interesting. If nothing else, it gives an appreciation for the age of many of the ideas that ended up in later OSes like CP/M and MS-DOS.