Niche Operating Systems

Eugenia writes: "So, you think that BeOS or AtheOS are niche Operating Systems? Well, you haven't seen anything yet. OSNews provides a list and short description of the most active and most promising Operating Systems written by individuals or small teams just for the fun of it or because they have a dream of how the perfect OS should be (is there such a thing though?). Some of them, like SkyOS for example, are even quite far down the line in terms of usability and advancements."

Comments

Interesting OSes

[DGolden]

EROS is a very promising O.S. - orthogonally persistent, cool security.

An "interesting" OS is AROS - it's AmigaOS, but open-source on x86, complete with Amiga-style:

pre-emptive multitasking.

total lack of memory protection, except for "cooperative" m.p. via semaphore locking.

blazingly fast IPC by by-reference message passing

on-the-fly shared library function patching

user-space device drivers (though, without any memory protection, user space is a pretty abstract concept :-).

integrated GUI + unix-like shell.

Also has a fun "soft-pseudo-reboot in a fraction of a second" feature, based on just freeing all memory except the kernel + vectoring to the kernel entry point - whcih means, you may crash due to lack of memory protection, but you'll be back up,very,very quickly :-).