Grief manifests in many different ways. This remains true with my falling out of love with computers. The specs arms race is exhausting, software is increasingly invasive, and hyperconnection has proven to be a noxious tedium. My heart is a few shades of broken, and my grief over this loss has begun to manifest as a yearning to heal.
So I've been exploring the roads less taken, starting at the beginning: the operating system. Linus Torvalds has recently taken a shine to "AI" generated code, and began accepting contributions to the Linux kernel in turn. To me, that's an immediate red flag - the Linux kernel is a keystone piece of software, and "just fork the codebase" is a dismissively glib way to respond to concerns about incorporating generative contributions. It's fair to assume that from here on out, Linux is going to have some issues.
Instead of being salty, I got curious about what else is out there for operating systems. Turns out, quite a bit:
- There's the BSD family of OSes, which technically includes MacOS. Alternatively, FreeBSD and OpenBSD exist, with additional forks like GhostBSD and HardenedBSD. The latter of those seems really interesting to me as a daily driver, and I'll probably give it a spon sooner rather than later.
- Haiku OS is a modern fork of BeOS, which has been quietly trucking along for decades. It has a lot of interesting features, especially with how it handles window management with an interesting mix of tabs, tiling, and stacking. Bonus points for working on older 32-bit systems, so I gave it a spin on one of my ancient Thinkpads, but was very dismayed to find the neat window management tricks required a Super key, which neither of my old Thinkpads has. Beautiful lack of M$FT branding, but not so great in practice. I might give it another go on a newer system just to see how it feels.
- SerenityOS is a fun little project reminiscent of Win95 but with a unix-like core. Most of the time I've seen commentary on this one has been people taking it for a spin in a VM, and I'd rather see if I could use it on actual hardware. They recently dropped 32-bit support, so it was out of the question on my old systems. Might be a fun experiment on another low-specc system I have waiting in the wings.
- KolibriOS was impressive on one of the Thinkpads - near-instant boot with plenty of stock tools. Extremely light and very viable for old systems, and probably worth revisiting more deeply.
- ReactOS is a hilarious reverse engineering of XP-era Windows from the ground up, and it apparently works quite well. On the shortlist.
- TempleOS is baffling and all that, but ZealOS exists as a fork that might be some fun.
- SvarDOS is a fork of FreeDOS that looks like it would be a great DOS-centric system. I might fire that up on an old desktop just for the nostalgia.
- RedoxOS is a newer not-linux written entirely in Rust that probably deserves some time.
I'm sure this is just scratching the surface of what's out there. More of these are going to be tested on my various systems, without concern about accessibility to the web or anything like that. I want to go back to more thoughtful computing, and be more considerate about what I do on what system. Pretty sure that messing around with these projects will be a good way to shake the dust a bit and get back to having fun on computers again.
