In today’s climate, I needed this: GentleOS, an operating system targeting both 186 (GentleOS/32) and even processors as old as the 80186 (GentleOS/16), with a lovely retro graphical user interface, usable on bare metal, and, of course, open source.
Its goal is to provide a simple platform for tinkering with retro hardware and running graphical interactive apps on bare metal.
At minimum, it only requires an i386 CPU, 4MB of RAM, and a VGA display capable of 640x480x16 mode.
By design it’s entirely monolithic, mostly configured at compile time, and only supports standard PC devices: VGA/SVGA, keyboard, PS/2 mouse, serial mouse, PC speaker. The only future plans are bugfixes, optimizations, and adding more apps.
GentleOS/32 has a pure 16-bit spin-off called GentleOS/16, which targets devices as old as 80186.
↫ GentleOS GitHub page
While it can be run on real hardware, you can also run it in Qemu to make it easier to test and play around with. It looks great, and the stated goal of just focusing on maintenance and possibly additional applications is music to my heart. With everything that’s going on in technology today, this is an ice-cold glass of tonic in a scorching, data center-infested desert.
I bet this would run great on the Hand386! I wish I had held on to my first x86 PC from 1995, a TI (Acer) TravelMate 4000M with a 486SX and 4MB of RAM. It would also be a good contender for this OS. I guess I’ll be firing up QEMU instead.
https://yeokhengmeng.com/2023/06/teardown-and-review-of-hand386/