Three days and nobody mentioned TempleOS? If attempting to build The Third Temple in the form of an OS isn't niche and exotic, I don't know what is. 🤣
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
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For anyone unfamliar:
TempleOS (formerly J Operating System, LoseThos, and SparrowOS) is a biblical-themed lightweight operating system (OS) designed to be the Third Temple prophesied in the Bible. It was created by American programmer Terry A. Davis, who developed it alone over the course of a decade after a series of manic episodes that he later described as a revelation from God.
Davis began developing TempleOS circa 2003. One of its early names was the "J Operating System" before renaming it to "LoseThos", a reference to a scene from the 1986 film Platoon. In 2008, Davis wrote that LoseThos was "primarily for making video games. It has no networking or Internet support. As far as I'm concerned, that would be reinventing the wheel". Another name he used was "SparrowOS" before settling on "TempleOS". In mid-2013, his website announced: "God's temple is finished. Now, God kills CIA until it spreads [sic]."
Davis died after being hit by a train on August 11, 2018.
TempleOS was written in a programming language developed by Davis as a middle ground between C and C++, originally called "C+" (C Plus), later renamed to "Holy C", possibly a reference to the Holy See. It doubles as the shell language, enabling the writing and execution of entire applications from within the shell. The IDE that comes with TempleOS supports several features, such as embedding images in code. It uses a non-standard text format (known as DolDoc) which has support for hypertext links, images, and 3D meshes to be embedded into what are otherwise standard ASCII files; for example, a file can have a spinning 3D model of a tank as a comment in source code. Most code in the OS is JIT-compiled, and it is generally encouraged to use JIT compilation as opposed to creating binaries. Davis ultimately wrote over 100,000 lines of code for the OS.
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This is at the very least super interesting.
Is Alpine Linux obscure? Well, using it as a desktop is obscure, I guess. The decision to use musl libc is the main limiting factor for desktop usage, but thanks to the existence of runtime package managers like flatpak and/or static linking, you can run basically anything that requires glibc on Alpine these days (at the expense of extra disk usage for glibc libs).
If you don't know much about Alpine, it is an extremely lightweight Linux distro designed primarily for containers and virtualization, that ships with busybox and musl libc. It's basically the closest you can get to GNU/Linux without the GNU. The main appeal to me is the simplicity of the tooling and installation, it's the only Linux distribution I've used that gives me a similar vibe to OpenBSD. The defaults are almost perfect, but the first thing I would do when installing it is install the docs metapackage (otherwise you have no manpages), and optionally replace busybox with coreutils and friends (personally can't stand how non-posix compliant busybox is). I'd also replace the default busybox ash shell with a nice kornlike such as oksh, a clone of the OpenBSD shell.
I had PostmarkedOS, which is Alpine with some extra phone stuff
We need more arm packages..
I have HoloISO running around on mini PCs because they just work as remote steam machines, can play games in their own right, and I can use them as media boxes if I want. I don't necessarily recommend it, but it was super easy to install and configure except for the Bluetooth issue that cropped up occasionally where I had to unload and reload the Bluetooth module. Now I just have a script that automatically does that on boot because I can't give a shit about fixing it.
I also have a couple of Slax USBs running around. They used to be relatively popular with folks who fixed computers. I like building from modules and I'm familiar with Slackware so it was a good fit for a live environment.
I did not know about Slax. Thanks.