Obscure OSes You've NEVER Heard Of

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If you’re no stranger to the world of weird operating systems, you’ve heard of the popular ones like Temple OS, Hannah Montana Linux, Red Star OS, and so on. But what if I told you that was barely scratching the surface of the iceberg?

In this video, I'll be looking at 6 obscure operating systems of increasing obscurity: ReactOS, Redox OS, helloSystem, Haiku, ToaruOS, and SerenityOS.

=| Links |=

=| Chapters |=
00:00 Intro
00:58 Sponsor
02:40 PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE
03:12 ReactOS
05:46 Redox OS
08:41 helloSystem
10:38 The helloSystem Experience™
16:31 Kalos rips into helloSystem some more
17:38 Haiku
20:48 ToaruOS
24:45 SerenityOS
29:26 Outro

=| Attributions |=

= | Disclaimer |=
This video was sponsored by Brilliant.
All opinions within the video are my own.

[KalosLikesComputers]

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[fsturmat]

This helloSystem feels more like a "helloWorld" to me. The fact that they took the time to publish a "Reviewer's guide" and implement VM detection on top of that, just for all of it to be the thing that it is.... what a shitpost of an OS.

[GumikoVT]

Toaru OS was definitely named after the light novel and anime series Toaru Majutsu No Index aka A Certain Magical Index. Misaka and Kuroko are the names of two popular characters. Pretty cool to learn my favorite series has an operating system named after it.

[azealo]

helloSystem introduces it self as rock solid, until it crumbles apart when you try to install firefox

[LesCalvin]

I'm 40-somethingmumble years old. I was 22 before I touched a Mac. "Intuitive my ass, " I said. helloSystem brought back memories.

[nicholaswood]

Fun fact about BeOS: Apple got very close to acquiring it and turning it into the official Mac OS. This deal fell apart, and they decided to acquire NeXT instead, and that OS formed the basis of what became Mac OSX.

[deviantsemicolon]

You have to admire the balls on the developers of helloSystem. They're like the GNOME of operating systems. It's their way or the highway

[PhirePhlame]

Fun fact: the ReactOS theming system is in the same format as XP's. I once copied the famous Luna theme from XP and put it in a react VM's themes folder, and it _actually worked!_ However, that's also how I discovered that not only is the "start" text...actually rendered as text, but the flag logo is _not_ baked into the start button! It's a separate graphic placed onto the blank button! Thus, the word "start" looked off due to a font difference and the genuine XP start button graphic still had the ReactOS globe icon placed onto it instead of the XP flag.

[mjdxp]

To all the people who say the terminal is too difficult and complicated, the whole song and dance that was required to install Firefox could have been accomplished with typing "sudo pkg install firefox" in a terminal window and pressing enter

[pixelheresy]

What? No 9front/Plan 9 from Bell Labs?

That may be right up your alley for a deep dive actually. Not only is 9 historically significant, but 9p, Inferno, Golang, and a host of other things are intimately tangled in that mess. And a bunch of turbonerds (myself included) use it as a secondary or even primary OS in the modern 9front distro.

[bitsloth]

I don't know man, that Hello System thing sure looks like a faithful MacOS clone. It hates when you install it on unapproved hardware, it hates when you install applications from outside the approved way of doing so, and it makes the most mondain tasks hard as hell if you step outside the very narrow way it wants you to do them. 10/10, just as big of a dumpster fire as the real thing.

But seriously, I don't know how they screwed all that up. All they had to do was start with NomadBSD/GhostBSD with Gnome or KDE installed and the menubar enabled, do a few thinks to tweak the default menus, then ship it. How do you screw that up?

[iskamag]

My favorite obscure OS is Mezzano. While it's still in "beta" stage, and not friendly to normal users, I love its premise and design.

[EthanBoiDev]

Nice vid! I am actually in a middle of recording a Operating System iceberg video myself. Gotta say, I find it pretty interesting how 90% of these are either unix-like or unix-based. Only a few outliers... shows you how influential Unix was

[obviousalexc]

My favorite fact about Serenity is the fact a new browser engine popped out of it (ladybird) which is now being ported to other OSs

[timcates]

Love the video, but was surprised to see you confused at hellosystem's "screen resolution" menu since it looked like it was just arandr a pretty common linux utility

[gabecapps]

I plan to turn an old 2010 Thinkpad into my travel laptop with Haiku! They have support for thousands of apps, and i’m pretty excited to be able to use it!

[jackie.dee.]

SerenityOS is the kind of OS I long for, but cannot have. The best of Classic Windows design but actually modern. But it’s just a hobby project…

[Maxjoker]

11:37 You're looking at arandr, a common utility for changing X11 display settings, with the menubar up top and no text on the icons. Sounds like something Apple would implement, I guess mission accomplished?

[thatwindowsxpfan]

The rotating and opacity feature is also implanted in a WM for Linux called WayFire, and is also available in Hyprland (with about 80 plugins)

[jonwallace]

I love how Doom was so ubiquitous with its open source and simple engine that it’s a baseline for the completeness of anything with a computer and screen.