I make the specification of non-linux because otherwise this would just become a thread full of obscure distros that do the same thing as a million other distros.
Some lesser known OSs:
- AROS - based on Amiga OS, has some derivatives like IcarOS and MorphOS
- Haiku - based on BeOS
- Redox - Unix-like, made in Rust (might technically count as linux?)
- Serenity - Unix-like, very late 90s look and feel
- Kolibri - Tiny OS, the image is ~44MB. It also has a smaller version that fits in a single floppy.
- PhantomOS - When 3 Russians decide to turn everything about a typical OS upside down.
Plan 9
It is an absolutely revolutionary OS by some of the original creators of Unix, that extends its core concepts in more coherent and elegant ways into the world of modern computing, instead of having everything from networking on up be tacked on by people who were perfectly capable but lacked the vision.
Examples:
Instead of NAT, if one machine on your network has the internet and the others don’t, you can say “use that other machine’s network stack now” and boom everything works. Your machine knows what its real external IP address is, it can listen on world-facing ports on the other machine as it needs to, everything works and is simple.
There’s a command for “run the rest of this session’s commands on that other machine’s CPU / memory” and it all just works. The sensation is that your computer just got magically faster.
Etc etc. I actually haven’t played with it extensively, and deployment is so limited that I’m not sure how useful it would even be, but if you are a fan of well made OSs that do things in a genuinely different fashion, it is objectively the best option to play around with. sdf.org has a place you can get an account on their Plan 9 machines and they do little free beginner courses in it over livestream.
I’ve come across Plan 9 in the past and assumed it was only really useful in a “time-sharing” type scenario like OG Unix used to be used for. Am I wrong about that?
Think less about time sharing and more about using all the computers you own together.
You would have a netbook with no compute power as your UI sitting on your couch. You could connect to your beefy desktop to do all the computations for your video editor or playing a game and never have to be sitting at your desk.
You could also have a big file store device with lots of drives to store stuff.
We can do some of this now, I ssh into my desktop from my couch and have a NFS in the basement. But they all operate as separate devices that i have to really work at getting to operate together. Plan9 was designed where you’d just pick devices off of the network and the tasks operated normally. Pick your video card, local or over the network to the beefier GPU.
The networking stuff probably won’t do you much good if you do not have other Plan 9 systems to talk to, but the GUI and window manager and editor, those also operate in this way that’s 100% different from anything else that exists. To me the networking and the way the file sharing works are probably the most interesting things, so IDK, you might be partly right.
I think this might be part of why it hasn’t caught on at all is that a lot of the stuff about it that works better only works better when talking with other Plan 9 systems, of which there aren’t really any.
Gotta love the naming of a P9 user space fork: Plan 9 from User Space
At a quick glance on the wiki page, it sounds like something that would work great if we needed hundreds “dumb” terminals that just connected to a central server and received/displayed the output back to the user
Incorrect. That’s X11; we have that. Plan 9 is a little hard to explain quick, but I gave some examples already of stuff that is trivial with it that’s a big weird difficulty on other modern systems, but in addition to that the whole UI and the terminal / editor also work radically differently to how Unixlike systems do it.
TempleOS, because for it to go mainstream, a sizeable chunk of the population would need to go fully insane, and I think that’d be interesting
Maybe more insane would actually cancel out the insanity already existing?
Or do I now sound insane?
Anyway, came for Temple OS as well.
Yup. Ctrl+F’d here.
I’d love for FreeBSD to become more mainstream/popular (again)
I really want to use FreeBSD but it doesn’t support my hardware sadly :(
Haiku - based on BeOS
“inspired by” would be more accurate. there’s no original BeOS code in Haiku for legal reasons (other than the interface, which was open-sourced with the release of BeOS 5). All backwards-compatibility with original BeOS software is (impressively) reverse-engineered. Haiku OS is, itself, original software made to - in every way - look, feel, and operate just like BeOS did.
edit: i had a buddy in high school who had a BeBox. it was like having the best of a Mac and a PC in one machine. it really was a spectacular machine and OS. i really wish Apple had picked it up, but they went with NeXTSTEP instead, which, i admit, was still a pretty solid choice.
TempleOS
So glad to see somebody finally mentioned the only God tier OS.
GNU Hurd and Plan9.
Gnu Guix is working on HURD integration.
I am on Guix, so I’m really excited to switch the kernel. But it won’t be available at least for a decade. Or maybe more.
I feel like HURD is the generational starship of operating systems. Will never be completed in my lifetime but eventually my great great grand children may some day use it.
Redox isn’t Linux, it uses its own kernel. I want this one to succeed above all others, just because Rust was born to perform this kind of application: guaranteed memory safety when dealing with tens of thousands of lines of code handling hundreds of moving parts running thousands of different tasks, all at a very low level.
I’ll second Plan 9, just because it sounds like scifi and truly takes advantage of how interconnected all computing hardware has become.
Third place goes to anything based on GNU Hurd. The microkernel architecture intrigues me, and I’d like to know how it effects the end user. Plus I’m just a big fan of the copyleft/FOSS aspect.
Also, I’d just like any mobile device alternative that’s not AOSP, and Linux seems like a bad fit for mobile in general. Why do we need a fully-featured, all-purpose kernel when we’re only gonna put it on a known number of SoCs and therefore a known set of hardware configurations? We could be optimizing the hell out of our privacy-friendly mobile OSes, but instead we’ve shackled ourselves to google or linux
PalmOS as an alternative to Android/ios
Do you mean the successor WebOS? Cause I thought that was pretty cool when I test-drove it in a mobile store.
It really feels like any alternative in mobile space would be a welcome addition, though first we’d need OEMs to stop being assholes and allow users to more easily install custom ROMs or whatever.
OpenBSD. Imagine everyone just running a secure OS.
I remember running BeOS back in the early 90s so I guess I’d go with Haiku
Redox OS seems like it’s turning into something cool.
I’m giving RedoxOS a real investigation. From a “let’s actually secure the code” perspective, it’s a next gen attempt over C/C++ at the kernel level.
ReactOS would be kinda fun
Back to the ol’ times of Windows.
To name something that hasn’t been mentioned yet, ArcaOS, which based on OS/2. It supports modern hardware and in addition to some preinstalled software, it also has some compatibility layers to run software from other OSs.
Refox OS. I know today isnt a magic bullet but it makes committing memory mistakes a lot harder. Also rust gets first class status as the is standard library calls it and we can slowly get over the legacy of C.
Nobody’s mentioned Guix. It’s a GNU project, which is like Nix, but has a number of novel features. I’ll copy in from my own thread about it:
Based on what I’ve heard so far: GNU Shepard instead of systemd, a package manager that compiles things from source and allows user-defined compiler options, a totally different way of arranging system files, and Guile-Scheme is used for everything; it sounds like there’s no other kind of configuration anywhere.
It’s planned to be Hurd compatible, so I’d argue it counts.