Notable Projects

This page maintains a list of operating system projects considered to be notable. An operating system is considered notable if it has received some form of success outside of the relatively tiny sphere of hobby operating system development (eg. has had a full release, is self-hosting, has been reported on outside of the hobby OSdev world, etc.) or if it has achieved such notability within the operating system development community as a useful answer to the question, "I want to see what kind of operating systems you guys have built."

If you believe your project meets one or more of the criteria above, feel free to add it to the list. The worst that could happen is you fall out of notability due to inactivity.

Everyone is welcome to add their own projects to the regular Projects list of all hobbyist operating systems.

Active Notable Alternative Operating Systems

9front Plan9front (or 9front) is a fork of the Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating system. The project was started to remedy a perceived lack of devoted development resources inside Bell Labs, and has accumulated various fixes and improvements.

http://lists.9front.org/ Open source https://code.9front.org/hg/plan9front Unknown Latest update: 2017-12-17, is active

BareMetal BareMetal is a 64-bit OS for x86-64 based computers. The OS is written entirely in Assembly while applications can be written in Assembly or C/C++. The two main purposes of BareMetal are for educational uses in learning low-level OS programming in 64-bit Assembly and to be used as a base for a high-speed data processing node. Source code is well documented and freely available. As of version 0.4.9 BareMetal OS officially supports multiple processors, memory management, and Ethernet communications. More information here - http://www.returninfinity.com/

Ian Seyler, ian.seyler [at] returninfinity [dot] com Open source https://github.com/ReturnInfinity/BareMetal-OS Unknown Latest commit: 2017-11-28

FreeDOS Today, FreeDOS is ideal for anyone who wants to bundle a version of DOS without having to pay a royalty for use of DOS. FreeDOS will also work on old hardware and embedded systems. FreeDOS is also an invaluable resource for people who would like to develop their own operating system. While there are many free operating systems out there, no other free DOS-compatible operating system exists. Sources are here: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/repositories/1.2/

Jim Hall, the mailing lists at http://www.freedos.org/lists/ Open source (GNU GPLv2) http://www.freedos.org Unknown Latest release: 2016-12-25, is active

Ghost OS A homemade operating system with a microkernel for the IA32 (x86) platform. The project is written in C++ and Assembly. Features: multiprocessor- & multitasking support, kernel API library, custom C library, ELF support, IPC (messages, signals, shared memory, pipes), VFS, window server & GUI with homemade toolkit, PS/2 keyboard & mouse driver, VESA video driver and more...

Max Schlüssel, lokoxe [at] gmail [dot] com Open source (GNU GPLv3) http://ghostkernel.org/ Unknown Last release: 2017-04-21, is active

Kolibri OS Kolibri OS was a fork of the 32-bit version of Menuet OS but has changed much along the way. Despite fitting on a standard 1.44 MB floppy, this wonderful OS contains: the complete GUI desktop, a lot of drivers and great software (such as web browser and music player), system programs and games! The Kernel and most applications, libraries and drivers are written in FASM, but some are in C-- (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-- ; link to their C-- compiler: http://c--sphinx.narod.ru/).

The Kolibri OS team Open source (GNU GPLv2) http://www.kolibrios.org Unknown Latest commit: 2017-12-17, is active

Pedigree Monolithic OS with several backends supported - x86, x64, MIPS32, ARM and PowerPC. Kernel written in C++ with the obvious bits of ASM. Offers a reasonable amount of POSIX support and a tiling GUI and can run Apache, DOSBox, and various other common programs. Planned to also offer a native API alongside POSIX for Pedigree-specific applications. Foster Milestone #1 (most recent release).

JamesM, bluecode, pcmattman, IRC freenode.net#pedigree Open source (ISC) http://www.pedigree-project.org/ Unknown Latest commit: 2017-12-15, is active

SeaOS SeaOS is a hybrid kernel with loadable modules that supports ATA, AHCI, EXT2, ELF, and many other fancy acronyms. It has basic networking support, initial VT-x support, and is self-hosting with a fairly complete unix-like userland. Designed for simplicity. My homepage: http://dbittman.github.io/seaos

Daniel Bittman, danielbittman1 [at] gmail [dot] com Open source (GNU GPLv2) https://github.com/dbittman/seakernel Unknown Last commit: 2016-05-13, abandoned

Sortix Sortix is a small self-hosting operating-system aiming to be a clean and modern POSIX implementation. It is a hobbyist operating system written from scratch with its own base system, including kernel and standard library, as well as ports of third party software. It has a straightforward installer and is can be developed under itself. Releases come with the source code in /src, ready for tinkering. Our homepage: https://sortix.org/

https://sortix.org/ ; Jonas 'Sortie' Termansen, sortie [at] maxsi [dot] org Open source (ISC) https://gitlab.com/sortix/sortix Unknown Latest release: 2017-12-02, is active

ToaruOS (とあるOS) Vaguely Unix-like graphical operating system with Python 3.6, GCC, compositing window manager, networking, dynamic libraries, and loadable kernel modules.

#toaruos on irc.freenode.net Open source (NCSA/University of Illinois license) http://github.com/klange/toaruos Unknown Latest commit: 2017-10-12, is active

Visopsys Visopsys (VISual OPerating SYStem) is an alternative operating system for PC-compatible computers, written “from scratch”, and developed primarily by a single hobbyist programmer since 1997. Its primary "useful feature" is a reasonably functional partition management program - the ‘Disk Manager’, which can create, format, delete, resize, defragment, copy, and move partitions, and modify their attributes. It supports both DOS/MBR and UEFI partition tables. It can also copy hard disks, and has a simple and friendly graphical interface. A basic version can fit on a bootable floppy disk, or you can use the entire system from a ‘live’ CD/DVD

Andy McLaughlin, andy [at] visopsys [dot] org Open source (GNU GPLv2) http://visopsys.org/ Unknown Latest release: 2017-06-07, is active