GentleOS
A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs
Details
- External ID
- 48435943
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- GentleOS
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- June 7, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 132
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9344262295081968
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
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 (https://github.com/luke8086/gentleos32) works on i386+, requires 4MB of RAM and VGA display supporting 640x480x16 mode or any 256-color VESA mode.- GentleOS/16 (https://github.com/luke8086/gentleos) works on 80186+, requires less than 192KB of RAM and a CGA display supporting 320x200x4 mode.You can find more details in the repos.
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
- operating systems for vintage computers
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Writing bare-metal 16-bit and 32-bit x86 operating systems requires low-level assembly, memory management, bootloaders, and hardware interrupt handling.
What it would actually take: The system requires x86 assembly (NASM) and C, developing a real-mode bootloader, setting up protected mode (GDT, IDT), paging, interrupt service routines, and drivers for legacy PC hardware (VGA, PIT, PIC, PS/2 keyboard). The hard parts are low-level CPU state switching, memory segmentation/paging quirks, and debugging without modern OS abstractions. This demands specialized systems programming and hardware-level operating system architecture expertise.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: AOSP (Android Open Source Project), DR GEM, FreeGEM, GEOS, AmigaOS
Concerns raised: Binary blobs required for full smartphone hardware support, Kernel memory footprint too large for older hardware, Lacks GPS, gyro, maps support in open-source alternatives
Feature requests: Documentation on internals, memory management, process scheduling, Support for 2MB RAM systems instead of 4MB minimum, Workarounds to run on systems with less memory
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 58 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #8 of 59 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 207 days after the earliest competitor.
- os2host32 · github · 2026-09-22 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- BananaOS, vibecoded operating system that boots on a 486 with ~11MB RAM · hn · 2026-02-27 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- RetroTick · hn · 2026-02-27 · 195 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- The Virtual OS Museum · ph · 2026-06-08 · 196 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- RetroMac · ph · 2026-06-27 · 219 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- My hobby OS that runs Minecraft · hn · 2025-11-17 · 236 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Aurion OS · hn · 2026-03-12 · 35 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- I vibecoded an ARM64 operating system that boots on real hardware · hn · 2026-01-10 · 24 upvotes · similarity 0.37
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.