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.
HURD, obviously.
I’m happy with any OS as long as it’s GNU.
Hear me out
metaverse
This is the only thing we should dream of
ReactOS. The “We have Windows at home” OS.
Maybe then it will see proper development to become that which it should be.
I wish I would win top prize of some lottery, I’d donate a good deal of money to ReactOS and pray it finally developed enough to at least manage to make stable installer images
Serenity for sure. I love the 90s aesthetic and would like to see it make a comeback. At the very least I’d like to see their Ladybird browser become mainstream - we really need more alternatives to the Chromium family.
There are a few aspects we need to consider…
For the UI, I would go with beOS, Haiku is cool, but the look is a bit too modern, I love the clean look of beOS’s UI
For the best compabillity, after a lot of work, ReactOS, a project aiming to create an open source os that is binary compatible with Windows 2000.
Maybe minix? Because microkernel.
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.
That “Unix” os from the og jurassic park movie.
That was actually Unix. Specifically the fsn file manager for IRIX.
There’s a Linux clone called fsv.
That’s real?! TIL…
I can’t decide if that changes my answer or not… lol Seems like a cumbersome way to browse files, but maybe that’s because it isn’t how I’ve learned…
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.
Yeah, I was going to say Haiku. It’s surprisingly capable for this day and age (although needs tonnnns of work)
MorphOS. It’s still kicking.
I wish Nokia N900 / N950 with Maemo or Meego OS. And full opensource, full MPL or MIT licensed.
I truly wish SailfishOS could be that replacement but I’ve been burnt too many times already.
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 :(
The only one of these that I know is Haiku (as an extension of BeOS). I was already a Mac user when Apple was flirting with purchasing Be, so I installed in on my PowerMac 9500 and took it for a test spin. I liked it, though I was too young and inexperienced (and this was pre-broadband) to really get a good feel for it. I think I switched back to MacOS within a day just because what else did I know to do with 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
