Alternatives
Products that do what Aurion OS, A 1.8MB OS with a browser, try it live (C/x86 ASM) does
I posted Aurion OS a few weeks ago on HN. Since then, the OS has gone from Beta to v1.0 Release with a lot of improvements: Blaze Browser: HTML/CSS/JS rendering with tabs and a developer console (local only, no full http/https support for now) Installer with user account setup and app selection Multi-resolution support (800x600 to 2560x1440, I plan to add 4096x2160 pixels in next versions) Unix-style luka@aurion prompt Serbian keyboard layout Python interpreter and Make build system 50+ terminal commands Window manager improvements and bug fixes 1.8MB ISO (entire OS including…
- 1AO
Hi HN! I'm 13 and I built Aurion OS as a solo learning project over 14 days (~12 hours/day). It's a 32-bit x86 operating system written entirely in C and x86 Assembly with no external libraries. What it has: Custom bootloader and kernel VESA framebuffer graphics (1920x1080, double-buffered) Window manager with draggable, overlapping windows macOS-inspired dock with transparency PS/2 keyboard and mouse drivers ATA hard drive driver with filesystem PCI bus enumeration RTL8139 network driver (WIP) Real-time clock Runs on just 16MB RAM (up to 10 windows simultaneously) Built-in apps:…
Mar 2026 · github.com
- 2MO
Hello HN! Showing off the first version of Munal OS, an experimental operating system I have been writing in Rust on and off for the past few years. https://github.com/Askannz/munal-os It's an unikernel design that is compiled as a single EFI binary and does not use virtual address spaces for process isolation. Instead, applications are compiled to WASM and run inside of an embedded WASM engine. Other features: * Fully graphical interface in HD resolution with mouse and keyboard support * Desktop shell with window manager and contextual radial menus * PCI and VirtIO…
2025 · github.com
- 3IW
https://lisagui.com/info.html This is a web OS I wrote in vanilla JS that looks like the Apple Lisa Office System (1983-85), with other contemporaneous influences and additional improvements and features. It's currently in alpha and isn't remotely bug free. I had been holding off on posting this here until it was somewhat presentable and useful. Please note; the Lisa conforms more literally to the desktop metaphor than most modern GUIs - some of the important differences are mentioned in the readme. This is a complete recreation of the UI in JS; it all renders to a single…
2025 · alpha.lisagui.com
- 4WP
We’ve been building infrastructure to spin up browsers for AI agents. Originally, we built[0] it as a pool of warm Docker containers running Chromium, exposing: - Chrome DevTools Protocol (for Playwright/Puppeteer) - noVNC (for live view) We’ve been following the unikernel space for a while, so we decided to see if we could get our image on one. We went with Unikraft Cloud[1]. Here’s how it did: - Boot-up time: 10–20ms (vs. ~5s for Docker containers) - Near 0 CPU/memory consumption when idle - Still ~8GB RAM when active (headful Chromium) Potential use cases: - Standby mode during…
2025 · github.com
- 5MF
Hi there! I've been on-and-off working on TacOS for a few months, which follows some UNIX-derived concepts (exec/fork, unix-style VFS, etc) and is now able to run a port of Doom, with a fairly small amount of modifications, using my from-scratch libc. The performance is actually decent compared to what I expected. Very interested to hear your thoughts. Thank you!
2025 · github.com
- 6VA
Hi HN! I’ve always been a fan of application launchers, and I was impressed by the approach the Raycast team took — especially their extension system. About six months ago I started building something similar for Linux, aiming to integrate deeply at the OS level and give extensions a lot of power. Vicinae is written in C++ with Qt Widgets. I chose Widgets over QML for more imperative control of the UI, especially around extension handling. So far that’s worked well — modern C++ is great. To support my goals I built a number of custom widgets, including a fully virtualized list that can…
Sep 2025 · github.com
- 7TI
2017 · tux.io
- 8SF
I've built a thing! A few months back someone (not me) posted my Mac app Droplings to HN. It was incredibly rough around the edges back then, and in alpha. Well, it's finished now and sparkles like crazy. Please take a look! :)
2012 · servus.io
- 9IW
Sep 2025 · github.com
- 10
- 11XA
2016 · github.com
- 12VO
10 months ago I posted on HN to announce the initial release of Vicinae, an "everything" command palette compatible with the Raycast extension ecosystem, only available on Linux. Today, after months of work, I'm finally releasing the first macOS version of Vicinae, with full feature parity with the Linux version! From a technical standpoint, it is still a Qt/C++ app with a Node.js powered extension runtime (like Raycast). Something as deeply system-integrated requires calling a lot of native APIs, and when I started the port I wasn't quite sure how easy it would be. Turns out it went a…
Jul 2026 · github.com
- 13AM
2024 · github.com
- 14MM
This project contains no code from Linux, BSD, Minix, or any other OS. Everything up until this point is written entirely from scratch, including a pure microkernel (that only implements multiprocessor priority scheduling, memory management, and interprocess communication), a work-in-progress implementation of the standard C library, and a variety of servers that provide drivers and other essential OS functionality. At the time of writing this post, the servers provide drivers for the keyboard, NVMe SSDs (that works on real hardware), a Unix-like virtual file system (with a single root…
2024 · github.com
- 15IG
Hey HN, For years, my local development setup has been a fragile mess of tools that never quite played nicely together. On my mac, it was a constant battle with Homebrew services starting (or not starting) on boot, conflicting PHP and Node versions managed by `asdf` or `nvm`, and a collection of `docker-compose.yml` files that I'd copy-paste and tweak for every single project. The cognitive load was just too high. Setting up SSL was another chore involving `mkcert`. Sharing a quick demo with a colleague meant firing up ngrok. And if I wanted to run two projects that needed different versions…
Oct 2025 · servbay.com
- 16FG
Built this as a guide for users of my hosting service. Everything here was run on a real instance. The Mesa/LLVM dependency is genuinely painful on a 1GB disk, and I couldn't find a way around it. WindowMaker won the window manager battle purely on dependency chain cleanliness; it pulls in no GTK, no Python, no audio stack. Happy to answer questions about any of the choices made. Screenshots at the end.
Mar 2026 · tierhive.com
- 17AA
Aurora's C++ units library called "Au" (rhymes with "hey you!") has been a small but critical tool in Aurora's software development toolbox. Today, we're sharing it with the world[1]: Au is now open source for all to use. Feel free to ask me any questions! [1] https://blog.aurora.tech/engineering/introducing-au-our-open...
2023 · github.com
- 18HI
This is based on an approach I made for a very high performance message and video multiplexing server. The project died, but I'm glad I get to share the a basic version with some http test code now. I admit this is the second time I've tried to show this off here today; I posted earlier but it got lost when no-one was watching :(
2011 · github.com
- 19P6
2016 · github.com
- 20IM
Try it at: ssh krnl.duetbrowser.com No sign up, totally free - no download. Let me know what you think. Prior art exists (brow.sh) but I wasn't satisfied with their graphical take. I wanted the raw, old skool terminal days of the early internet - BBS, and old green phosphor library comptuers - but running the modern web, with all the bells and jingle jangle whistles (JavaScript, etc). No funding, no VC, just 100% raw terminal fun. Not sure how long the demo will last, but try it out.
Jul 2026
- 21IB
Hey HN. Built this because LangSmith needs a cloud account just to see my own traces. pip install opensmith — everything shows up at localhost:7823. SQLite. No accounts. No config. Fully offline. 800+ downloads in 2 days. Surprised me. Would love honest feedback from this community.
May 2026 · pypi.org
- 22LB
May 2026 · github.com
- 23SO
https://myserverisonfire.com Just got this made and I'm using it daily for personal use. Looking for beta testers and feedback! :)
2014
- 24TD
Hey everyone! I hope you’re all having a great day. Today I’m sharing an experimental open-source project I’ve been working on for the past few months called Wildcat. Wildcat is an embedded persistent storage engine implementing an lsm tree similar to RocksDB and or LevelDB. The motivation for this system was to try to solve the multi-writer bottlenecks that most embedded systems incur. With that, during my journey with storage systems especially the log structured flavour I’ve implemented a lot of interesting optimizations and algorithms in regards to the write and read paths. I hope you…
2025 · github.com
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