GentleOS – Classic operating system with a lovely retro GUI

Published: 3 days ago (June 9, 2026 at 05:50 AM EDT)

1 min read

Source: Hacker News

Source: Hacker News

GentleOS/32

A hobby operating system for vintage 32-bit PCs.

Its goal is to provide a simple platform for tinkering with retro hardware and running graphical interactive apps on bare metal. At minimum, it only requires an i386 CPU, 4MB of RAM, and a VGA display capable of 640x480x16 mode. By design it’s entirely monolithic, mostly configured at compile time, and only supports standard PC devices: VGA/SVGA, keyboard, PS/2 mouse, serial mouse, PC speaker. The only future plans are bugfixes, optimizations, and adding more apps. GentleOS/32 has a pure 16-bit spin-off called GentleOS/16, which targets devices as old as 80186.

For details on building and running, see USAGE.md.

Gallery

Attributions

Assets in vendor/icons8 have been sourced from Icons8 using the free license and modified

Assets in vendor/mona have been extracted from the Mona Font and modified (LICENSE)

Assets in vendor/int10h have been extracted from the The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack and modified (LICENSE)

License

Except where otherwise noted, GentleOS/32 is licensed under GPLv2.

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