Who doesn’t love a desktop-oriented hobby operating system to start off the weekend?
SkiftOS is a hobbyist operating system built from the ground up with a focus on modularity, simplicity, and modern design principles. Driven by a dissatisfaction with the fragmented user experiences prevalent in contemporary operating systems, SkiftOS strives for deep integration and a cohesive aesthetic. This project is a labor of love—an artistic pursuit rather than a commercial product.
↫ SkiftOS gitHub page
Reading through the GitHub page and SkiftOS’ actual website, it reminds me so, so much of the desktop-oriented hobby operating systems of the early 2000s, like AtheOS, SkyOS, and others. It has its own microkernel, C++ core library, package manager, reactive UI framework, an entire desktop environment, and even a browser engine. This operating system is remarkably complete in the features that it already offers, especially considering its hobby status.
The desktop environment is called Hideo, and it’s remarkably beautiful when you consider we’re talking about a hobby operating system. It comes with a variety of applications, too, mostly covering the basics we’ve come to expect from a desktop operating system, like a text editor, archive manager, task manager, image viewer, media player, a file manager, and so on. Meanwhile, the browser engine is called Vaev and is highly experimental, but its existence illustrates just how broad this project really is.
I haven’t been able to find some time to run it yet, but if you’re interested, they advise you to run it using qemu. While running it on real hardware is technically possible, it’s not advisable due to the alpha state of the operating system.
