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

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

51 comments

·March 23, 2025

I know some interesting non-DOS/UNIX-based open source OS like HelenOS, MenuetOS, or Kolibri. They are X86/X64 only, though.

Are there similar things say for ARM/RISC/etc ?

dlcarrier

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

RISC OS Direct has modern webbrowser, Iris:

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

mepian

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

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

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

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

opless

It’s not as unix-y as you think.

Go try it

bandie91

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

rewgs

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

snvzz

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

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

pajko

2809

[flagged]

dredmorbius

Explain?

2809

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.

jdougan

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

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

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

evanjrowley

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

"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.

slicktux

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

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

notorandit

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

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.