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Aurion OS

A 32-bit GUI operating system written from scratch in C

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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: Terminal (with DOS mode), Notepad (save/load), Calculator, Paint (multiple colors and brush sizes), Snake game, Settings (theme switching), and System Info.Currently works best on QEMU, VirtualBox, and VMware. Real hardware support is still a work in progress.Next goal: TCP/IP networking stack.I'd love any feedback, suggestions, or criticism. This is my first OS project and I learned mass amounts while building it. Happy to answer any technical questions!

HN · launched Mar 12, 2026 · 35 upvotes (top 19%) · 0 views

Niche: experimental and embedded operating systems · 142 launches, 6 in the last 7 days ▼ -60% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags
  • Horizontal
  • Hardware & robotics
  • Developer
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

More like this: all 142 launches in experimental and embedded operating systems →

Could you build this?

No Writing a custom 32-bit x86 operating system from scratch with a custom bootloader, kernel, memory management, and VESA graphics drivers requires bare-metal systems engineering and assembly expertise that AI assistants cannot reliably generate end-to-end.

What it would actually take: Building a custom OS requires writing a multi-stage x86 bootloader, implementing GDT/IDT tables, hardware interrupt handling (PIC/APIC), paging and physical/virtual memory allocators in C and assembly. It also involves programming hardware drivers (keyboard, PS/2 mouse, timer, VESA BIOS extensions for framebuffer rendering) and building a custom window manager completely devoid of standard libc or POSIX layers. Deep expertise in computer architecture, CPU operating modes, and bare-metal debugging (using QEMU and GDB) is mandatory.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: other hobby OS projects (general category mentioned), v86 (browser-based OS emulation suggested)

Concerns raised: Unnatural commit history - files committed in alphabetical order, not showing genuine development progression, Account credibility - very new GitHub account with all activity in last 6 months, Suspicion of AI-generated project rather than authentic work, Toolchain complexity and portability tradeoffs with alternative languages

Feature requests: More robust filesystem implementation beyond current flat FAT-style structure, virtio-net driver alongside RTL8139 for better VM testing, Browser-based deployment via v86 for easier demos

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 404 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #102 of 405 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 134 days after the earliest competitor.

Related data

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