ArcaOS, KolibriOS, AROS, FreeDOS, Plan 9, TempleOS, or even just an older version of Windows or Linux.
What’s your use case? How’s your experience?
I’m just waiting for someone to admit to using TempleOS as their daily driver
If the developer hadn’t gone off the deep end and lost control of his mind I actually think he was primed to make a massive impact on the industry. So much talent wasted
What happens if you find someone like that? Temple OS has no Internet connection and is difficult to use. In fact, it is quite possible to use Haiku OS and even FreeDOS. You will just be using web versions of popular applications, that’s all. Even for DOS, there used to be a software package called Arachne browser. It is a static web browser, messenger, word processor and more.
Any madman daily driving TempleOS is too powerful to be left alive.
TempleOS is cool. You don’t need the Internet, it establishes a direct connection to the Seventh Heaven in the process.
I occasionally use Haiku on an older laptop, just for fun.
I mostly use my Linux box for gaming, so Haiku is not the best fit for this.
I get ya. I use it on my Asus eee machine but it’s more due to the “because I can” mentality than anything practical.
I want to use Sailfish on my phone. It’s really intuitive and far nicer to look at than Android. I used to daily it three or four years back, and I picked up an Xperia 10 IV last year in the hopes it would get a release as the 10 I, II and III have previously. Alas it appears less and less likely each day.
I wonder why they haven’t pulled the trigger on that. I haven’t kept up to date on Sailfish since I accidentally put my 10 through the wash
Not as a daily, I do like seeing what obscure and old OSes I can get booting in UTM on my M1 Macbook though
Does NixOS count? I’ve been using it for a few months now and love it.
Care to tell me a bit about it?
Yeah! Nix is a declarative, reproducible operating system; so instead of changing configuration files for each service (wayland, ssh, etc.) you have an OS-level configuration file that configures and deploys all services. If the configuration works once, each time you apply the configuration (to any computer) it will work in exactly the same way again. Changing this configuration file creates a new “generation” of the operating system, and you can switch seamlessly between generations – so if your wayland changes brick your system, it’s really easy to roll back. It’s also really easy to test things and roll forward.
The downside is that this configuration file comes with a lot of syntatical magic that requires reading a ton of source code. You also have to learn the Nix programming language, which is relatively simple by itself; but the way it interacts with your servers can be really opaque.
If you’re a programmer or really excited by the idea of a declarative, reproducible operating system, you will seriously love it. If you’re more of a Linux enthusiast… not so much.
I do! I daily drive SourceMage Linux. I found it while I was spelunking distrowatch (along with its brother, lunar linux - they both branched from sorceror back in the day) I ended up having so much fun tinkering with it I ended up writing some spells (packages) for it and ended up getting pulled on as a spell maintainer :) I don’t really have a use-case for it; Before it, I was hopping between arch and void linux. I do really enjoy the freedom I have though with SMGL - it’s a source-based distro, so it’s similar to Gentoo in a sense. Plus I just enjoy having a deeper look into things! I break stuff often and sometimes spells don’t install correctly/have problems but solving those issues just makes it that much more fun :) I do highly recommend it for anyone looking into trying out a source-based distro and Gentoo doesn’t interest them. (we’re #sourcemage on libre.chat IRC, come say hi if you’d like, or if you need help installing, i’ll happily walk anyone through the process!)
I haven’t touched SourceMage in over a decade, but I loved how the terminology made it feel like you’re a wizard casting spells to build up everything.
I could never get it working 100% but if I can find a good burner laptop I might just have to give it a go again.
Yeah it’s honestly hard to get set up - we haven’t had a new ISO in a solid decade so the only way to install currently is via tarball. Our installation guide though is pretty good, and we’re always happy to help people getting it up-and-running :) I’m in the IRC 24/7 for the most part so i’m always available to assist. If you decide to, i’ll see you in there! As for a burner laptop - you can install SMGL on just about any device (we have 32-bit support still!) I have SMGL installed on a few of my netbooks ;) … compile times are less than savory though lol, 1+ day for glibc compilation, the misery…
(I will note though that the only huge downside to SMGL is that we don’t have multilib support - 64-bit is 64-bit only, which means no native things like Steam that require 32-bit libs)
(( we have workarounds though, i’ve added flatpak to SMGL and steam runs perfect in it!))
I run the unstable HaikuOS build in a HyperV VM and keep updating it every week or two. Waiting on compatibility for hardware and just being able to use a web browser without issues. The epiphany port is decent but it’s still lacking. Things seem pretty active and really hope it’s more usable eventually. If done right, it could become the desktop OS alternative the world needs. Seems great design decisions were made early that should help it do well once the thousand paper cuts are reduced a bit.
even just an older version of Windows or Linux
Maybe this is obscure enough: I used Debian PPC on an old Apple PowerBook G4 back in 2011 to get me through my last semester of community college. My main laptop had finally died (The CPU had overheated, it was an old hand-me-down that barely ran XP before I loaded linux on it, and its fan had always ran hot). I found the PowerBook on ebay for 30 bucks and decided, after 10 minutes of research, to give it a shot. Of course, MacOS on it was a no-go, as it no longer got updates and most software for MacOS was no longer packaged for PPC. It was my first experience using a different/non-mainstream architecture, and it was rough.
The main things I needed, like Firefox and Libreoffice, worked well enough. I got gameboy and N64 emulators working, which was enough gaming for me at the time. My main issues were getting Flash to work just so that I could use one website our college used for one of our classes. I remember spending hours trying to get a third-party Flash plugin working (I think it was called “pepper” and having all kinds of trouble with it. I also remember just wanting to watch a movie or TV show in VLC, and although VLC worked like a champ, there were some formats/codecs that would just lag hellaciously on it, and when I researched, the answer I found was that they just didn’t play nice with PowerPC architecture (or more precisely, the drivers for the onboard graphics for this PowerPC cpu… some combination of it all) and that nobody really wanted to work on the issue. Because hardly anyone was using PowerPC on their regular computer by then.
Every time I went to install something, there was a 50/50 chance that it wasn’t available in the repos. I’d hear about new software coming out - the linux community seemed to really be growing then, and ElementaryOS was taking off and with it, a lot of modern-looking linux apps and stuff built on Electron was coming out - but it was usually not out there for PPC. I couldn’t use Spotify, I don’t even think the web version worked. I couldn’t play Minecraft (lol I think the laptop would’ve died if I’d even attempted that). I’d grown fond of Sublime Text Editor (look, i’ve grown up a lot since then) and it wasn’t available. I was basically limited to FOSS apps that someone, anyone, had been kind enough to build and put in the repos for my silly little dying architecture. Or FOSS apps that I was brave enough (with my limited linux know-how at the time) to try to compile (I think I compiled mupen64plus for it? I think that was the only one I had to do)
So yeah, it was a pain. But mostly you could use regular GNU/Linux with your core apps and any FOSS stuff without issue.
Oh, and Youtube didn’t really work, until they switched to the HTML5 player. Then it worked, but would lag on any resolution over 480p.
I upgraded to a Thinkpad X60 that summer when I finally landed a job and to date, that Powerbook is the worst computer I ever owned. (I didn’t mention them since this is a post about Operating Systems, not hardware, but it had hardware issues: it was heavy, the screen flickered if it wasn’t at a certain position, it got incredibly hot when charging, and the fans were noisy as hell).
I still think it’s fun to run linux on something other than x86 - I play around with ARM linux on other devices, including Ubuntu Touch and postmarketOS on an old phone. But for my desktop linux experience, I think I’ll stick to x86 from here on out, thank you very much.
I hadn’t checked in on the HaikuOS project in well over a decade. It’s great to see all of the progress they’ve made!
is ReactOS really obscure? 😅
Does Qubes OS count? I’ve been using Fedora Silverblue as my daily for years, and Qubes really isn’t that different especially with the Fedora templates. The default XFCE4 desktop is UGLY so I had the tweak it a bit to be more Gnome-ish. (I once installed Gnome in dom0 but didn’t like the experience). I like the privacy benefits of Linux and disposable template VMs as well as added security with Qubes.
HaikuOS is covered mostly by action retro in Youtube, it’s okayish… mostly I think tabbing and the UX design of Haiku is useful for me…
I even imitate it in XFCE Fedora Spin
