GentleOS – A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs

In plain words

GentleOS is a pair of hobby operating systems for running bare metal applications on vintage PCs. The 32-bit version runs on i386 machines with 4MB RAM and VGA display support, while the 16-bit version works on 80186+ systems using less than 192KB RAM and CGA displays. Both versions are designed for tinkering and experimentation on older hardware, with source code available on GitHub.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

Hobby operating system for vintage 32-bit PCs. Contribute to luke8086/gentleos32 development by creating an account on GitHub.

A hobby operating system for vintage 32-bit PCs, built for tinkering with old hardware on the bare metal. It has a spin-off called GentleOS/16 , which targets even older, 16-bit PCs. The only prerequisite is Docker & Docker Compose, supporting linux/amd64 platform. docker compose run --rm dev make -j4 You will find the resulting binaries in build/ . docker compose down --rmi all Testing The easiest way to test is to open gentleos32-web.html in a browser. Additional assets like wallpapers and songs can be provided using an initial RAM disk (initrd). uv run tools/mkinitrd.py [FILES] --disk-image gentleos32-disk.img Adding wallpapers To add a wallpaper, save it in PNG/JPG/GIF/BMP/PPM format…from github.com

In the maker’s words, at launch

Hello HN, I've been working on a simple OS for tinkering and running bare metal apps on vintage PCs. Since I couldn't quite decide whether to target pure 16-bit, or slightly more capable 32-bit machines, I ended up with two separate versions: - GentleOS/32…

• 
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