logoalt Hacker News

GentleOS – Classic operating system with a lovely retro GUI

310 pointsby tekkertjetoday at 9:50 AM66 commentsview on HN

Comments

iamnotheretoday at 12:20 PM

Copy/pasting my comment from the other post:

This is great, thanks for releasing your work. Very impressive.

You may get some interest from others in the retrocomputing/permacomputing sphere if you implement an Uxn emulator; it is extremely simple and can run on very limited hardware. https://100r.co/site/uxn.html

Vintage hardware would be a great host for Uxn programs, so I suspect this would generate some excitement.

mysterydiptoday at 10:44 AM

> The only future plans are bugfixes, optimizations, and adding more apps.

Perfect. Nice to see a platform target stability instead of constantly reinventing itself and its APIs. Definitely want to give it a go!

nosioptartoday at 12:15 PM

I think this is fantastic! I love that the code is so clean my dumb ass can understand it despite not using C much.

show 1 reply
Waterluviantoday at 3:21 PM

Kind of an odd statement I think, but I really like the aesthetic of early OS GUIs where you could tell half the tools were pretty much there as developer tools.

Dwedittoday at 3:24 PM

There weren't too many GUIs that used the PC-BIOS font. Most of them wanted to get away from that.

Aldipowertoday at 10:17 AM

A pre-build floppy disk image would be great, so I could run it on my IBM PS/1 from a floppy.

show 1 reply
hansvstoday at 12:20 PM

Nice! The project also has a 16-bit variant https://github.com/luke8086/gentleos, not clear if it works on 8086 IBM PC, but I'll give it a go. Been looking for a reason to power up my IBM PC again.

reconnectingtoday at 11:04 AM

GUI looks a but BeOS inspired, but somehow even cleaner.

show 3 replies
gt0today at 11:34 AM

Made me think of Breadbox Ensemble, which is GEOS, and was really lovely.

show 1 reply
ameliustoday at 1:09 PM

Part of why these images look so nice is because these systems were not so locked down.

rasztoday at 2:51 PM

Am I crazy or are the "photos" generated? I did have T1800 and it never looked like this. It had a very early very bad grayscale LCD wiht fiddly contrast control, not a perfect crisp vibrant OLED like this page shows.

example how one looks like irl https://allegrolokalnie.pl/oferta/laptop-toshiba-t1800 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxIc_UVKxvc

phendrenad2today at 2:34 PM

Love the photos of it running on 386/486 laptops. So cute!

ge96today at 2:59 PM

Ahh the Librettos... I had a couple of 50s at one point, one of those looks cool unusable thing and the brittle plastic damn, I opened it and the hinge snapped lmao my heart my soul

Unusuable because of how small the keys are

vortegnetoday at 1:42 PM

What a lovely-looking OS! Also great to hear that the project isn't aiming for infinite changes!

Will be digging out some old hardware to test it out very soon, this is exciting!

kolesnikov-archtoday at 11:49 AM

[dead]

mdcttoday at 11:58 AM

This reminds me of the era when operating systems felt more approachable and visually distinct. Modern UIs are often cleaner, but many of them have lost some of the personality that older systems had.

Damjanskitoday at 12:47 PM

<3<3<3

shevy-javatoday at 11:25 AM

> A hobby operating system for vintage 32-bit PCs.

I am all in favour of great projects, but why a differentiation between 32-bits or 64-bits? I don't understand that. Is a computer that is 32 bit or 64 bit, either way which, not worthy?

Edit: I understand a motivation if it is on simplicity choosing one or the other, but other than that I don't see why that should ever be a goal worthy to be pursued. Software should really "just work" no matter the number of bits and bytes.

show 6 replies
xtiansimontoday at 11:27 AM

[flagged]

show 2 replies
neofrogtoday at 12:42 PM

[flagged]

show 1 reply