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

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luke8086 couldn't decide whether to build for 16-bit or 32-bit machines, so they built for both. GentleOS comes in two flavors: the 32-bit version runs on an i386+ with just 4MB of RAM and a VGA display, while the 16-bit version runs on an 80186+ with less than 192KB and a CGA display. That's not a typo—192KB. You can boot this on a machine from 1985.

It's a hobby OS for tinkerers who want to run bare metal apps on vintage hardware without the weight of Linux or the complexity of rolling their own from scratch. The future plans are bugfixes, optimizations, and adding more apps—which is honestly the most refreshing thing I've seen on HN in years. No roadmap, no "disrupting the industry," just building something cool and sharing it.

This got 119 points on Hacker News and caught the attention of the retrocomputing and permacomputing crowds. Someone even suggested implementing a Uxn emulator, which would let it run on absurdly limited hardware. That's the spirit. Not everything needs to be a startup.