draft0 - a shared blog by just some people

ToaruOS

This one I consider one of the more interesting ones. It has a modern, well-design desktop and windows manager. It's user-friendly in that it just start as expected with no need for settings or choices and has an introduction for newcomers. The well-rounded look makes it look very mature. In fact, the first time I booted it I checked that it really isn't "just" a Linux distribution that's trying to hide that fact on the surface. And it isn't. The person who developed ToaruOS over 13 years apparently focused on finishing the part that help create a good first impression before starting other features that might be expected from an OS.

The one feature that makes ToaruOS stand out among other hobbyist operating systems is one of its compositor: Windows can be rotated in any angle by dragging the window's title bar while holding down the ALT key.

Besides the usual UNIX-like command line utilities there are very few apps pre-installed on the live system. Not even a graphical text editor. There is a package manager. But since the NIC of my laptop is not supported, I couldn't try it out.

Overall this feels like a very promising project. An OS that is usable right now and would benefit the most by getting more apps written for or ported to. ALl tho more disappointing that the sole developer has abandoned the project recently.

Snowdrop OS

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Shrine (Github)

Shrine is a fork of TempleOS. Let's not get into the interesting story of how TempleOS came to be. If you don't know it already, you can read about it, or not. Shrine is a fork that mainly gets rid of all the religious stuff but keeps the unique approach of how things are done in this OS. I'm not sure what other changes have been introduced in the fork. Development seems to be stalled. But it definitely is an improved version from TempleOS. There's a lot to say about this very different OS. I'll leave it to a few points: The only screen resolution is 640x480 and it has a text-based windows UI. Everything is very C. It's written in C, config files are C code, commands on the command line are C code, ... Keyboard shortcuts (as well as everything else) don't follow any existing convention. Everything about this OS seems unique and different, or at least alternative. I'm not an author of C stuff. So I didn't get much done in the time I tried Shrine. But I bet it's an interesting experience for others, even without contributing code. I wouldn't be able to use it with all it's blinking and moving title lines because of a lack of space (pixels).