GentleOS - A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs
Summary
GentleOS/32 and GentleOS/16 are hobby operating systems for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs, providing a platform for tinkering with retro hardware and running graphical apps on bare metal.
View Cached Full Text
Cached at: 06/08/26, 09:22 AM
luke8086/gentleos32
Source: https://github.com/luke8086/gentleos32
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.
Similar Articles
The Virtual OS Museum
A tool that lets you relive vintage operating systems right on your desktop.
CP/M-86 & MS-DOS Cross Development Environment
This project provides a cross development environment for CP/M-86 and MS-DOS, including compilers, assemblers, and emulators for retro computing.
Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux
A hobby project enabling classic Windows 9x environments to run inside a modern Linux subsystem.
I've built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of
A downloadable virtual machine bundle that provides pre-configured emulators and launchers for nearly every operating system in computing history, from the Manchester Baby to modern OSes.
GateOS
GateOS is an all-in-one workspace designed for serious exam aspirants to streamline their study process.