Obscure OSes You've NEVER Heard Of

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Published 2024-04-29
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If you’re no stranger to the world of weird operating systems, you’ve heard of the popular ones like Temple OS, Hannah Montana Linux, Red Star OS, and so on. But what if I told you that was barely scratching the surface of the iceberg?

In this video, I'll be looking at 6 obscure operating systems of increasing obscurity: ReactOS, Redox OS, helloSystem, Haiku, ToaruOS, and SerenityOS.

=| Links |=
Discord: discord.gg/3V99F4cxFR
Website: www.chriskalos.xyz/

ReactOS: reactos.org/
Redox OS: www.redox-os.org/
helloSystem: hellosystem.github.io/docs/
Haiku: www.haiku-os.org/
ToaruOS: toaruos.org/
SerenityOS: serenityos.org/

=| Chapters |=
00:00 Intro
00:58 Sponsor
02:40 PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE
03:12 ReactOS
05:46 Redox OS
08:41 helloSystem
10:38 The helloSystem Experience™
16:31 Kalos rips into helloSystem some more
17:38 Haiku
20:48 ToaruOS
24:45 SerenityOS
29:26 Outro

=| Attributions |=
Nearby explosion with debris.wav by juskiddink -- freesound.org/s/108641/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
Magic Wand Glitter by qubodup -- freesound.org/s/211624/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
VHS VCR Static Noise and Glitches by SkyernAklea -- freesound.org/s/508187/ -- License: Attribution 4.0

= | Disclaimer |=
This video was sponsored by Brilliant.
All opinions within the video are my own.

All Comments (21)
  • @HexCSharp
    helloSystem introduces it self as rock solid, until it crumbles apart when you try to install firefox
  • @fsturmat
    This helloSystem feels more like a "helloWorld" to me. The fact that they took the time to publish a "Reviewer's guide" and implement VM detection on top of that, just for all of it to be the thing that it is.... what a shitpost of an OS.
  • @LesCalvin3
    I'm 40-somethingmumble years old. I was 22 before I touched a Mac. "Intuitive my ass," I said. helloSystem brought back memories.
  • @mjdxp5688
    To all the people who say the terminal is too difficult and complicated, the whole song and dance that was required to install Firefox could have been accomplished with typing "sudo pkg install firefox" in a terminal window and pressing enter
  • @8bitsloth
    I don't know man, that Hello System thing sure looks like a faithful MacOS clone. It hates when you install it on unapproved hardware, it hates when you install applications from outside the approved way of doing so, and it makes the most mondain tasks hard as hell if you step outside the very narrow way it wants you to do them. 10/10, just as big of a dumpster fire as the real thing. But seriously, I don't know how they screwed all that up. All they had to do was start with NomadBSD/GhostBSD with Gnome or KDE installed and the menubar enabled, do a few thinks to tweak the default menus, then ship it. How do you screw that up?
  • @GumikoVT
    Toaru OS was definitely named after the light novel and anime series Toaru Majutsu No Index aka A Certain Magical Index. Misaka and Kuroko are the names of two popular characters. Pretty cool to learn my favorite series has an operating system named after it.
  • @nicholaswood3250
    Fun fact about BeOS: Apple got very close to acquiring it and turning it into the official Mac OS. This deal fell apart, and they decided to acquire NeXT instead, and that OS formed the basis of what became Mac OSX.
  • @PhirePhlame
    Fun fact: the ReactOS theming system is in the same format as XP's. I once copied the famous Luna theme from XP and put it in a react VM's themes folder, and it actually worked! However, that's also how I discovered that not only is the "start" text...actually rendered as text, but the flag logo is not baked into the start button! It's a separate graphic placed onto the blank button! Thus, the word "start" looked off due to a font difference and the genuine XP start button graphic still had the ReactOS globe icon placed onto it instead of the XP flag.
  • You have to admire the balls on the developers of helloSystem. They're like the GNOME of operating systems. It's their way or the highway
  • @pixelheresy
    What? No 9front/Plan 9 from Bell Labs? That may be right up your alley for a deep dive actually. Not only is 9 historically significant, but 9p, Inferno, Golang, and a host of other things are intimately tangled in that mess. And a bunch of turbonerds (myself included) use it as a secondary or even primary OS in the modern 9front distro.
  • @jonwallace6204
    I love how Doom was so ubiquitous with its open source and simple engine that it’s a baseline for the completeness of anything with a computer and screen.
  • @toa12th4
    The jacksfilms haiku melody got me
  • @iskamag
    My favorite obscure OS is Mezzano. While it's still in "beta" stage, and not friendly to normal users, I love its premise and design.
  • The boing ball behind you it's a really cool easter egg! I was afraid you would count AmigaOS among the "obscure" systems, but you didn't!
  • @EthanBoiDev
    Nice vid! I am actually in a middle of recording a Operating System iceberg video myself. Gotta say, I find it pretty interesting how 90% of these are either unix-like or unix-based. Only a few outliers... shows you how influential Unix was
  • @gabecapps
    I plan to turn an old 2010 Thinkpad into my travel laptop with Haiku! They have support for thousands of apps, and i’m pretty excited to be able to use it!
  • @timcates4261
    Love the video, but was surprised to see you confused at hellosystem's "screen resolution" menu since it looked like it was just arandr a pretty common linux utility
  • @jackie.dee.01
    SerenityOS is the kind of OS I long for, but cannot have. The best of Classic Windows design but actually modern. But it’s just a hobby project…
  • @UltraZelda64
    OMFG... SerenityOS sounds like literally everything I want in a modern OS. Retro, classic Windows style at first glance? Check. UNIX-like under the hood? Check. Modern features to bring it kicking and screaming into the present? Hell yes. Move on over ReactOS. You seemed cool... like two decades ago. But now you're old, still buggy as hell, still can't do much without crashing; becoming more and more obsolete by the day by the evolution of Windows itself, and how many Windows applications would I even care to run these days? Probably like... two. This is like taking an old Linux distro I used for a bit which used the Equinox Desktop environment... but it sounds like SerenityOS pushed that concept to the max. I can't wait for ISOs to be available and to try this thing out.