OSNews often reports on small and hobby operating systems. Here is a list for you to vote for the one with the right amount of technical and wider success potential for a bright future. Note 1: The Poll is now closed. Thank you for voting!
Note 2: There are more small OSes around (e.g. µnOS, Athene, Rome etc) but we picked only the non-commercial, “hobbystic” in nature, unique in codebase and architecture and the most well known of the bunch. If you have never heard of these small OSes before, make a search on OSNews about them! Linux and derivatives (e.g. blueeyedos, cosmoe etc) or Plan9 do not fit to the poll because of some of the reasons outlined above.
Update: The AROS choice is now deleted due to a hack by a certain individual in favor of AROS. For your interest, AROS had 5% before it got tampered.
…shows real promise, too.
you are right, I really forgot about it. It is really early now (only 30 votes so far), so I will add it immediately!
Definately, AROS (1st vote!@#$!) is a very promising hobby OS, and a lot of work has already been done. IT got my vote- and I’ve never been any big Amiga nerd, never had one.
I voted for Aros but SkyOS is looking really nice.
I voted for Aros but SkyOS is looking really nice.
You mean will look real nice when the new theme is completed
I was really interested in MenuetOS when it first started, but I don’t like the direction they’ve gone off in. It’s a mature system, but the developers seem to be stuck on working on trivialities. Unfortunate, cause I thought it had the potential to become more than just a hobby OS.
My choice would have been Syllable if it wasn’t for SkyOS’s upcoming GUI.
Great job to both dev teams!
Syllable is starting to look like a resonably mature operating system that was designed with workstation type use intended from the start. It also a POSIX based environment with a lot of BeOS style features in the Display Server and FS.
SkyOS looks interesting too, but what is its lisence status?
You can’t have it both ways. If something is ‘enterprise capable’, its not a HobbyOS.
Yeah, I think this poll is a little biased away from GNU/Linux, but those of us read OSnews won’t be surprised. I suppose Linux is becoming quite mainstream anymore, so perhaps it might not be viewed as a hobby OS by some.
I chose none, but I think I would say Damn Small Linux, The ability to do a hd install, re-master and tweak the hell out of it is awesome.
Never thought i would say this but with the grid coming and most of my fellow class-mates at the university right on top of it, the most promising obscure OS i see is Plan 9. This os seems to be the way unix was SUPPOSED to be with all the low lying defects pounded out.
Plan9 is not a hobby OS, it is in fact have a commercial version.
Linux is not a hobby OS anymore either, it has commercial versions. It would have being considered for this poll if this was still 1993.
Ofcourse your right, and in my opinion ReactOS is the best hobby OS because they have a clear cut direction for their kernel. In any case i still root for Plan 9 (yes, yes, even though it is not a hobbyos)
For those who may have forgotten, here are links:
OpenBeOS — http://www.openbeos.org
MenuetOS — http://www.menuetos.org
Syllable — http://syllable.sourceforge.net/
TriangleOS — http://members.chello.nl/~w.cools/
ReactOS — http://www.reactos.com/
SkyOS — http://www.skyos.org
FreeDOS w/GUI — http://www.freedos.org
DROPS w/DOpE — http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/~nf2/dope.html
AROS — http://www.aros.org
Other — http://www.osnews.com
None — http://www.microsoft.com
(accuse me of being a karma whore if you want, but I think you’re on the wrong site for that)
As for my personnal choice, I greatly hesitated between those two. I finally voted for OpenBeos, as it’s the one with a slight chance of being something useful (and/or different from the current commercial OS).
Yet, a big thumbs up to SkyOS, it may not bring anything different or new …. but it’s such AN AMAZING ONE-MAN ACCOMPLISHMENT for crying out loud !
I voted for openbeos. SkyOS looks amazing the way it’s coming out, but having a drop in beos replacement, and opensource. Damn! Also OpenBEOS has a lot of apps ready to get running or ported..
if that’s a hobby OS.
Maybe SkyOS.
I voted for SkyOS. They are really focusing on a sexy-desktop which i can’t wait for.
What about BlueEyed OS? or NewOS? These both look great!
What GUI did you have in mind, Eugenia?
BlueEyedOS is based on Linux, it is not based on a “new, unique” architecture from scratch, as it is one of the requirements of the poll.
NewOS could indeed be part of the poll, however, we haven’t seen a release for more than a year, so I can’t really consider it atm as I don’t know its exact status.
Whichever works…
SkyOS.
I like the sexy new desktop. 
Hey,
I’m reading skyOS’ 5.0 preview page, it says they’ve already implemented an OpenGL accelerated desktop. Does anyone know the details on this? Is it anything like quartz is to [mac]OSX? Man that was implemented. If it is like Quartz, i’d like to see the Gnome people do something like that.
While I find Syllable and AROS cool, I have no choice but to be biased, and vote other. I wish the best of luck to all Hobby OS Developers out there.
It’s not looks, but what’s inside that counts
[QUOTE]
By contrasutra (IP: —.nas3.jersey-city1.nj.us.da.qwest.net) – Posted on 2003-10-05 04:55:34
You can’t have it both ways. If something is ‘enterprise capable’, its not a HobbyOS.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t think so. Why can’t a hobby OS be capable of anything? If someone takes time and effort to make it so, and does so as a hobby, it’s a hobby OS.
I didn’t see any limitation on the percentage of work done, I voted for mine (as ‘other’), which is still under development and writing. It’s being built on top of an exokernel, and doesn’t resemble any other OS. Very original, very different in design. It will give the finger to the status quo, upon completion.
–EyeAm (such a rebel)
What about Fiasco?
http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/fiasco/
There is also Fiasco-based JourneyOS:
http://journeyos.sourceforge.net/
I voted for SkyOS (surprise, surprise!). Not only because the progress is remarkable, but also because it’s mainly a one man show.
Although I’d love to see an OOo port for Sky.
My slightly biased vote went to Syllable .. Next release sounds rather promising actually
. *anticipates*
I voted for SkyOS it;s a really nice looking OS
I voted SkyOS because it is a os with a incredibly fast development (SkyOS 5;new gui,usb,mysql…)
What’s with HydrixOS? http://www.hydrixos.de/
Should have been titled “Most obsure hobby OS with potential”. You can’t tell me that certain versions of linux are not hobby OSes nor can you tell me that version of BSD are not hobby OS’s. Even though OpenVMS is still used commercially i consider it a hobby OS if you run it on an ancient vax in your basement or alpha. But good info i haven’t heard of any of these OSes before Archos looks cool.
FIASCO ist DROPS’s kernel and as such included in the poll.
I voted for SkyOS pretty much for the same reason as the rest of the people. Its development is quick which is great. My second choice would have been AROS and then Syllable.
Now, since we mentioned AROS
here is a small queston.
I hope I don’t move too much off topic
I downloaded their ISO image of their web site, the binary bootable CD format, and I created the bootable CD and all that went fine. When I reboot, a menu appears, asking me to select a screen resolution and a color depth for the Windowing environment. I do that, a blank screen appears and something keeps trying to read my floppy drive. And it just does that, keeps trying to read from the floppy and nothing happens, the blank screen remains while it keeps trying to read the floppy drive.
This is what it says on their site:
“Simply insert the boot floppy into the drive and reboot the computer. The boot is fully automatic, and if everything works you should see a nice screen after a while”
Has anyone had similar problems? I have, GeForce2 32MB MX 100/200
sorry, that quoted Italic line should have been
Simply insert the CD into the first CDROM drive and reboot the computer
Every poll is biased. Is that so hard to understand? It’s impossible to include every single OS in the world. If you don’t like biased polls then don’t bother with polls.
If not by 5.0, then by 6.0 – A full C++ API for GUI development, somewhat similar to BeOS’s. It’s very very early in development right now, I just started a couple days ago, only have a small handful of classes full or partially implemented, but I hope, and I think Robert agrees SkyOS needs something like this.
I voted for SkyOS (I really like what they’ve been doing), but I probably would have voted for atheos if it were an option.
There isn’t anything that precludes it from being a hobby OS…..is there?
http://www.atheos.cx/
linux & BSD are bare based on already mature and stable kernels, they maybe hobby but they are based on an already successful core, the Os’s listed in that list, are based on totally new kernels or kernels that have not made it into mass circulation
Can any of the others claim the same amount of hardware support + a unified media framework + it’s own journaled filesystem?
Adam
Whats the the SkyOS license?
AtheOS hasn’t been updated in over two years, which is why we started Syllable over a year ago. Syllable took AtheOS 0.3.7 and continued development; I’m about to release Syllable 0.5.0 today. Check http://syllable.sourceforge.net
Omer Hickman wrote:
> SkyOS looks interesting too, but what is its lisence status?
The author withdrew his sketchy EULA and is GPL compliant, so it’s status is perfect legal. At least as long as you like close-sourced proprietary OSes, but that’s another discussion…
ReactOS is one of the main favourite OS, since this OS is compatible with Windows NT applications and drivers.
This will provide a good starting point and alternative OS to the people who want to use the Windows NT facilities.
cheers
any GeForce2 or nvidia or latest ati card should work fine.
How are your cdrom connected? If its connected as slave alone on the ide channel aros vill only show a black screen.
Atleast it did that before if i remember correctly..
Try downloading the floppy version and boot with that.
I hadn’t heard of DROPS, but I’m so glad that the L4/Fiasco work has continued. In my opinion, it was some of the best and most novel low-level OS work that’s been done in the past 20 years. I was really afraid that it would die when Jochen Liedtke died, but it’s good to know that his work is continuing.
For those who don’t know, L4/Fiasco/DROPS is a “nanokernel” message passing based architecture with superb performance because, primarily, it passes messages when possible directly in CPU registers. Many years ago they ported Linux to the nanokernel and L4 demonstrated multiple instances of Linux running simultaenously on top of the nanokernel with only about a 5% performance penalty. It is what Mach should have been.
Braddock Gaskill
Syllable
BTW: 0.5.0 should be out sometime today(hopefully) and let me tell you it is going to be the best version yet!
sure, it uses the Linux kernel and X, BUT it is a hobby OS IMHO because it is seeking the same goals as OpenBeOS.
This poll would not be that bad if people stopped bombarding Amiga websites begging people to vote for AROS.
SkyOS is a nice hobby OS.
Linux is not an OS, it’s simply a kernel just like NewOS (so far anyway).
There is as far as I know not a single LinuxOS just a bunch of distros. Either way, it get’s disqualified by the same reason as BSD’s (how many houndred are there BTW?) it’s mature work and not especially unique kernelwise (*Nix).
My vote went to OpenBeOS, it’s very promising since it’s far behind SkyOS and Syllable which is currently running and will probably pick up the fight within 12 months.
MenuetOS is extremely cool, but I wouldn’t say it looks promising as they indeed do it as a hobby not for being mainstream or usable IMHO!
who all knows both that these OSs exist and have knowledge there is a poll on a site called OSnews.
Spreading the word can’t hurt OSnews regardless of who votes for what OS, and the results of the poll, at best will only help OSnews to better determine who is next on teh list of doing stories for…. till the next poll.
Seeing the score I do, currently putting SkyOS a good bit in the lead only inspires me to go and find out more about SkyOS, and its license. So of course an article on SkyOS by OSnews would be something I’d likely read as of current.
The phrase “greatest potential Hobbist OS” is something of a trick phrase, for if one of these is to reach the highest Hobbist potential…. well what would that be?
Currently there is only one “system” I consider as a high potential hobbist system, and that is the C=One, for it will truely be hobbist that finally are allowed to explore the programming of FPGAs… and the wonders of what will they come up with that will then be turned into technology advancement in commercial systems…. Systems that reconfigure on the fly..
As to the line or list of OSs this poll and thread is about, AROS, a system and development I support, what does it matter to me that it is currently low in a poll of greatest hobbist potential where the greatest hobbist OS or system to date (GNU/Linux) has reached thru the spectrum all the way to the other end of commercial software, but not over the line of trusted computing illusion and wrongful manipulations of consumers……. to not be listed?
What does it mater to me? Perhaps the poll is saying AROS doesn’t have the greatest hobbist potential of those listed, because it has more than just that….????
I suppose the same could be said about the others as well, but there is one things for sure, and that is where licenses of these different OS are not in such conflict with each other to prevent cross breeding….. where the really smart OS come from and reinvention is decreased so there is more time for genuine innovation.
BSD’s (how many houndred are there BTW?)
Actually, as far as I am aware there are only 7, and of those only 3 are major contenders: FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. If you read the news, you’ll have heard that the only commercial BSD, BSD/OS, was just discontinued. The remaining 3 are just alternate distributions of the 3 major BSD’s, and one of those (PicoBSD) seems to be dead. This leaves us with 3 actively developed major BSDs (Free, Net, and Open), and 2 actively developed minor BSDs (Mir and Dragonfly).
I looked but was only able to find a mention of GPL is some of it…. shrug…
It’d be nice if the TCP/IP stack was of such license to make it open source and available for use in other systems.
Anyone know about it?
The results will be skewed because you have to vote just to see them. Example – I have never used any of these OS’ but I still want to see the results. Now I still have to pick one just to see them. How many people will do this same thing?
By the way, I picked the first one in the list.
Sorry, there is no way to see the results without really voting, there is no clean solution for it, as we outsource our poll engine.
I’d like to know in which way the poll has been tampered. Last time I looked at it, AROS has about the 5% of the total votes, which doesn’t look like tampering.
However, I’d appreciate if you, Eugenia, could remove the mention of AROS from the header, since I don’t think it’s fair that AROS gets such bad pubblicity because of some stupid retard.
>Last time I looked at it, AROS has about the 5% of the total votes
When I took it down, it was getting ~1 vote per second, and it was already at 10%, in a matter of minutes!
>could remove the mention of AROS from the header
Sorry, but it is important to explain to readers what hapepened to the option. I could move the update to the main body of the article though, not in the front page.
> I don’t think it’s fair that AROS gets such bad pubblicity because of some stupid retard.
I don’t think that AROS gets bad publicity for this, an anonymous did it.
>could remove the mention of AROS from the header
Moved to the main body.
“Update: The AROS choice is now deleted. That will show you tampering with the poll unfairly. It is very unfair for the other hobby OSes, for a poll that is so interesting to see genuine results. By tampering with the poll you are doing bad to your favorite OS, not good. What did you gain now? A deletion!”
This poll has as much genuine results as a call this number for your genuine fortune to be told you.
In other words, its really for your entertainment pleasure and to help OSnews determine what hobbist OS to do an article on next.
Personally if OSnews is going to do an article on AROS, I would prefer it to be on genuine merits of the project than that of poll popularity of fortune telling by vote of fortune tellers. Just as I would of prefer of these other OSs.
Don’t we all really have enough of the pump up and leaving a hype dump?
@Eugenia
How about not mentioning it altogether?
And I’d still like to know what led you to think the poll has been tampered.
>How about not mentioning it altogether?
Sorry, this is out of the question. People will come back to see the results and they have the right to know what happened.
>And I’d still like to know what led you to think the poll has been tampered.
I am monitoring the polls. There is no way an option can jump from 5% to 10% in 1 minute, especially after 2,650 votes. I also checked our refferal stats, expect a small post on a low-volume forum on amiga.org *yesterday* (and not when the problem occured), there is no one linking the poll in favor of AROS. The poll was tampered (it was getting 1 vote per second which is even more votes per second that osnews polls get in GENERAL, not just for a single option!), and it is not the first time this happened. It has happened before for FreeBSD and Debian in previous polls. We outsource our polls so we have little control over their code, so there are a few times that they are getting tampered by fanatics. This was one of these times.
I am sorry for the bad news Fabio, but there is not much I can do. I want fair results on my polls, I take them seriously.
I will modify my “updated text” in the story to reflect how much AROS had before the tampering (5%).
http://www.makalis.fr/~bertrand/FreeVMS/indexGB.html
I think we should have a *VMS system on x86 at least.
Depends on what one wants. They don’t have (exactly) the same purpose. I don’t believe in ‘one rules them all’. Personally, i’ll go with cheap PPC hardware + Amiga4/Morphos, if those systems support basic GNU utils like Bash, GCC nd hopefully also OpenSSH i’ll be more then happy. I’ve heard they can run MacOS 9 and Linux, which is just awesome! Or second hand stuff with Linux:)
> I am monitoring the polls. There is no way an option can
> jump from 5% to 10% in 1 minute, especially after 2,650
> votes.
I agree, I was just asking, not questioning.
However, isn’t there any way you can get rid of those votes?
> I also checked our refferal stats, expect a small
> post on a low-volume forum on amiga.org *yesterday* (and
> not when the problem occured), there is no one linking
> the poll in favor of AROS.
This makes me wonder which news sites was that John Raymond guy talking about in his post. I only see http://www.ann.lu pointing to this poll, hardly a “bombardment”…
I tend to think that this tampering has been done by someone who doesn’t like AROS, rather than by someone who likes it, because unless one is really stupid, this is the end result he/she should expect for doing such things.
>However, isn’t there any way you can get rid of those votes?
Unfortunately no, not as long we outsource the poll engine.
@ Eugenia
From your comments about an AROS supporter “tampering” with the results, understand that a single user from a single IP has created some kind of script to vote 1 time a second for that option? Why hasn’t the script a protection from this kind of behaviour? Kind of basic, IMO …
>Why hasn’t the script a protection from this kind of behaviour?
Because I don’t have access to the source code of the poll’s engine. I already said that a zillion times before. Also, people will always find workarounds anyway…
@ Eugenia
I really think you shouldn’t use that poll engine if it is that badly implemented. If I were you, I would consider to either:
1) Take it off the air, until a proper poll engine has been found
2) Re-evaluate your purpose with having polls on your site at all. Usually, polls are only a form of light entertainment and to generate traffic, since they never can have any scientific value whatsoever anyway.
I have tried 4 other free poll engines. The others were much easier to crack.
Stop moaning, if you Amiga fanatics can not act responsible then you deserve the consequences, also weird how only the usual moaning Amiga users are attacking Eugenia for no reason.
Blame the stupid zealots instead of Eugenia.
Too bad AROS had to be removed, so I had to vote “other”. Second on the list would be OpenBeOS for me.
care of that AROS removal too much. Sure, some A*****e has tried to cheat and so you AROS people & followers have to live with the consequences… But we _all_ know that AROS is very promising and miles ahead of mostly all other hobby-OS, even still miles ahead of OpenBeOS. 🙂
My vote went for OpenBeOS thow…
Regards
Keep up the great work you OS Guys!
PS:What actually is a hobby OS?
Why is ReactOS no hobby OS? Because of it aim? nope.. what about the AROS & OpenBeOS aim?
But you need access to the server and mysql access
Advanced Poll 2.0.2
http://proxy2.de/scripts.php
> Stop moaning, if you Amiga fanatics can not act responsible
> then you deserve the consequences, also weird how only the
> usual moaning Amiga users are attacking Eugenia for no
> reason.
First of all, who exactly are you talking to? It seems you are talking to us who asked questions about AROS’ removal, but then you also say WE are fanatics which don’t act responsibly. Are you really saying that I screwed up the poll? If that is not what you meant, I really urge you to rephrase what you said.
In the second place, no one is attacking Eugenia.
Let’s just say that there was one brainless idiot (probably someone without a social life) who thought it was pretty cool to screw up a OSNews.com poll. Well, congrats man, you did it.
Now, can we go back to what this was all about? Which hobby-os seems most promising? I voted for Sky but OpenBeOS looks pretty promising as well, of course. Sky got my vote, though, ’cause of the immense progress being made by Robert.
Voted other = AROS
And no I’m not a fanatic 🙂
I hate it when one person cheat and make the whole community look stupid…. sigh
How are your cdrom connected? If its connected as slave alone on the ide channel aros will only show a black screen.
hey arosdev, thx for the advice. Currently, I have set my DVD-ROM as a primary booting device and then the floppy and then the hard drive. I am not sure how it is connected. But I also have a CD burner, so I will try setting this in the booting sequence. If this doesn’t work either, I will go with the floppies
thx
> Stop moaning, if you Amiga fanatics can not act responsible
> then you deserve the consequences, also weird how only the
> usual moaning Amiga users are attacking Eugenia for no
> reason.
Why do you blame this on everyone? There was one person here cheating, not the whole community.. I did not cheat, still you blame me…
I agree on the cause of removing though, but blaming this on a whole community is LAME!
Open BeOS for me. SkyOS came in as a close second, but I shy away from closed source projects with no clear cut way to continue development once things go down the shitter. Which is more of a problem for a small project with little manpower like SkyOS. If the main developer gets sick of it, *bam* the users are out in the cold. I’ve seen it more than once, I’m not interested to go through that ordeal again.
Ok my apologies, it was worded a bit over the top but i still think it was some Amiga fanatics, also this is not the first time this crap has happened when something to do with the name “Amiga” is involved, who ever you guys are who keep messing up polls really need to act like normal human beings.
Anyway thats my last post and SkyOS is still a good hobby OS :o)
I would have voted for AROS had I gotten here before it was removed… stupid people messing with the polls. So I went with other instead. I like SkyOS though too, and am looking forward to something more from ReactOS as well, but as an Amiga fan, I am really impressed with AROS since it is getting close to what I was clammering for 5 years back an AmigaOS on x86 hardware.
well well so aros got deleted..
well i guess this means this poll doesnt deserve my vote.
I have no idea what to vote for, but let the OS run programs (like games) as fast as fuggin possible AFAFP.
I completely agree with you HAL. Closed source projects either goes commercial or *disappears*
I’m one of “the bad guys” reading http://www.ann.lu/ many times a day. I saw the begging for votes for AROS and went over to this site. I wouldn’t however voted for AROS if I saw better alterantives (and AROS was already removed due to the poor stupid amiga people). I steped thru the list of oses one after another and sooner or later reached SkyOS which got my vote. Damn that os looks impressive, it already has all the support I expect from a modern os (almost already at a state better than my current installation of BSD), it’s a ONE MAN JOB and the gui for version 5 looks awesome. More power to this guy =D. Btw, AROS didn’t come close to many of the oses
> I hate it when one person cheat and make the whole
> community look stupid…. sigh
And I hate when someone makes a whole community look stupid because one person cheats.
John Raymond wrote: “Stop moaning, if you Amiga fanatics can not act responsible then you deserve the consequences”, and I bet he is not the only one that is looking at the poll and draws conclusions like this. This was very uncalled for IMO. I am myself an Amiga supporter, but I am also a free thinking individual, and I hate it when people just puts me in the same bag as some cheater just because I like to follow the development of the various Amiga OS’s. Heck, I did not even vote in the poll, because I think polls are kind of stupid anyway since they have no scientific value whatsoever. Polls can only be viewed as something that is there only for fun and to generate some traffic to the site, it should not be viewed as something as serious as a reason to make a whole community look like a bunch of “moaning, irresponsible fanatics that deserves consequences”. Whenever there is a poll there are allways some people that wants to “cheat” (a strong word for lightweight entertainment such as polls) and make their choosen alternative look better. This is not an Amiga phenomenom, this is a *poll* phenomenom …
Just my opinion though, and with that said, I am leaving this behind me now! 🙂
I voted “other” because NetBSD was not listed.
Remember me to spank you with some cow today, OSNews admins.
Cows rule !
NetBSD – a hobby OS? You must be kiddin’
Its a free UNIX Derivat – a BSD – and you can run almost all LINUX, UNIX stuff you ever dreamed of…
Regards
Andreas
Why is NetBSD not a hobby OS yet Syllable is? Syllable is for the desktop, whereas NetBSD’s purpose is to be ported to everywhere possible. I think NetBSD is more of a hobby OS than Syllable.
Well unless someone has been paying us to develop Syllable but forget to mention it this past year, I’m fairly certain Syllable is a hobby. Some NetBSD ports are supported by University or even commercial interests.
All the way. One man, one great looking OS (soon anyway). Now, what’s it going to take to get drivers written for ATI radeons…not to mention my M-audio soundcard!
I use Free Dos at work (for an old hc16 compiler) and I tinker with Plan 9 at home and it has been GPL’d recently…
Just a word about me: I’m the guy who started AROS.
Now a word to the person who tampered with the polls.
1. You owe the people in this forum, the people who run OSnews and the developers who have spent many hours on AROS a huge apology.
2. You do realize that you left a lot of traces on the poll server which we could hand over to your ISP to get rid of you, don’t you? And if you hacked that machine, too, we could still find you. Just because you don’t have to leave home doesn’t mean you can’t be caught.
Sorry for that but it did hurt.
I’ve been out of the hobby OS scene for a long time and don’t recognize but a few of these, but I thought for sure Atheos would be part of the poll.
AtheOS is dead. Syllable is in its place.
Thanks, I wasn’t aware. The Aethos site still looked somewhat current.