ember
An operating system written from scratch: boot sector, FAT filesystem, DOS-compatible interrupts, sound, a 32-bit runtime and a graphical desktop
Details
- External ID
- 1368510458
- Source
- GITHUB
- Company
- —
- Product
- Ember
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Sept. 13, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 137
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9452984883423008
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 17, 2026, 5:02 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 17, 2026, 5:02 p.m.
Enrichment
- Theme
- systems tools and desktop utilities
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- scratch-built 32-bit operating system with graphical desktop
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Building an operating system from scratch with custom boot sectors, FAT filesystems, DOS interrupt compatibility, and GUI drivers requires deep low-level computer architecture and assembly expertise that AI cannot substitute for.
What it would actually take: Development requires x86 assembly and freestanding C/Rust compiled via bare-metal cross-compilers and tested in QEMU. The core challenge is handling the 16-bit real mode bootloader, configuring GDT/IDT tables for protected mode, implementing DOS INT 21h emulation, and writing custom hardware drivers for storage and VESA graphics. This demands specialized knowledge of low-level computer architecture and kernel development.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 1539 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #90 of 1540 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 317 days after the earliest competitor.
- Vanilla OS 3 Reunion · hn · 2026-08-24 · 33 upvotes · similarity 0.71
- Nønos · hn · 2025-12-23 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.71
- WonderBox · github · 2026-09-20 · 181 upvotes · similarity 0.69
- personal-os-starter · github · 2026-09-11 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.68
- teatime-os · github · 2026-09-15 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.67
- holodor · github · 2026-09-23 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.65
- FSM · hn · 2026-06-28 · 30 upvotes · similarity 0.63
- Otty · hn · 2026-06-17 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.63
Other launches for this product
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.