Haiku OS’s Beta 5 Release Brings Us Into A New BeOS Era

The name BeOS is one which tends to evoke either sighs of nostalgia or blank stares, mostly determined by one’s knowledge of the 1990s operating system scene. Originally released in 1995 by B…

FreeBSD At 30: The History And Future Of The Most Popular BSD-Based OS

Probably not too many people around the world celebrated November 1st, 2023, but on this momentous date FreeBSD celebrated its 30th birthday. As the first original fork of the first complete and op…

Linux, Now In Real Time

Although Linux runs almost every supercomputer, most of the web, the majority of smart phones, and a few writers’ ancient Macbooks, there’s one major weak point in the Linux world that …

Amiga, Interrupted: A Fresh Take On Amiga OS

Serena OS is not just another operating system—it’s a playground for hackers, tinkerers, and Amiga enthusiasts pushing vintage hardware to new limits. Born from modern design principles and f…

Haiku OS: The Open Source BeOS You Can Daily Drive In 2024

Haiku is one of those open source operating systems that seem to be both exceedingly well-known while flying completely under the radar. Part of this is probably due to it being an open source vers…

Apple System 7… On Solaris?

While the Unix operating systems Solaris and HP-UX are still in active development, they’re not particularly popular anymore and are mostly relegated to some enterprise and data center enviro…

Jenny’s Daily Drivers: Raspberry Pi Desktop

One of the more exciting prospects upon receiving one of the earliest Raspberry Pi boards back in 2012 was that it was a fully-functional desktop computer in the palm of your hand. In those far-off…

Open-Source Cell Phone Based On ESP32

Over the past decade or so, smartphones have exploded in popularity and seamlessly integrated themselves into nearly every aspect of most people’s lives. Although that comes with a few downsi…

Jenny’s Daily Drivers: FreeBSD 13.2

Last month I started a series in which I try out different operating systems with the aim of using them for my everyday work, and my pick was Slackware 15, the latest version of the first Linux dis…

Jenny’s Daily Drivers: Slackware 15

As a recent emigre from the Ubuntu Linux distribution to Manjaro, I’ve had the chance to survey the field as I chose a new distro, and I realised that there’s a whole world of operating…

Is MINIX Dead? And Does It Matter?

Is MINIX dead? OSnews is sounding its death-knell, citing evidence from the operating system’s git log that its last updates happened as long ago as 2018. Given that the last news story on th…

Can Hobbyists Bring SGI’s IRIX OS Back To Life?

Irix was the operating system developed by Silicon Graphics from 1988 to 1998. The OS supported the company’s high-end workstations and served in many serious roles. The company cut off suppo…

An Entire RISC-V Operating System In 2000 Lines

While Microsoft and Apple don’t release the source code for their operating systems, a good estimate is that it takes around 50 million lines of code to run these software behemoths. The Linu…

Build Your Own Bootable Emacs Environment

An old joke is that Emacs is a text editor with an operating system included, given that its extensibility and customization often goes far beyond traditional text editors. Part of its well-earned …

Computers For Fun

The last couple years have seen an incredible flourishing of the cyberdeck scene, and probably for about as many reasons as there are individual ’deck designs. Some people get really into the prop-…

WheatSystem Is A Homebrew 8-Bit OS

[Esperantanaso] has long been involved in producing homebrew 8-bit computers. His various builds could all achieve different things, but he grew frustrated that applications written for one could n…

The NES Gets Its Own OS

Until recently, most video game systems didn’t need their own operating systems in order to play games. Especially in the cartridge era — the games themselves simply ran directly on the…

New OS For Commodore 64 Adds Modern Features

The Commodore 64 was a revolutionary computer for its day and age. After four decades, though, it gets harder and harder to use these computers for anything more than educational or hobby electroni…