From Newsgroup: comp.misc
From the «x386» department:
Feed: Hackaday
Title: GentleOS, A Simple OS For Your Old PC
Author: Jenny List
Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2026 08:00:09 +0000
Link:
https://hackaday.com/2026/06/13/gentleos-a-simple-os-for-your-old-pc/ Podcast Download URL:
https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/gentleos-featured.jpg
[image 1 (link #1)]
Every month or so we bring you a Jenny’s Daily Drivers article, in which
we share with you an esoteric OS and try to use it for the everyday work
of a Hackaday scribe. As part of that ongoing effort, the world of
esoteric operating systems is always on the radar, even though many of
them are unlikely to fulfill the Daily Driver requirement.
Even so, sometimes we see an OS that we like, and so it is with
[Luke8086]’s GentleOS[2]. It’s an operating system — or to be pedantic —
a kernel shell into which applications are compiled, for older 16 and
32-bit x86 computers with a very low hardware requirement. It brings a simplicity to older PCs that we like.
Downloading the tiny image and booting it in a virtual machine, it’s
almost ridiculously quick to boot on a 2020s computing behemoth with
gigabytes of RAM and multiple 64-bit cores. It has a basic but nice and
clean GUI, and a selection of basic applications and games. You won’t be using this for productivity work, but that’s hardly the point. It’s particularly pleasing to look at the code and find something simple
enough to understand, too.
We like it, if you have an older PC it might be worth spinning this one
up for a bit of fun.
Links:
[1]:
https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/gentleos-featured.jpg?w=800 (image)
[2]:
https://github.com/luke8086/gentleos32 (link)
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