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A similar project discussed a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46866544

Interview With Ville Turjanmaa, the Creator of MenuetOS (2001) (1)

Ville Turjanmaa: The current distribution fits to a single floppy and I plan to keep the basic OS functions that way.

— Man of his word!

1. https://www.osnews.com/story/93/interview-with-ville-turjanm...

My friends and I used Menuet back in 2003 to circumvent our highschool's OS restrictions. Impressive to see it's still around, great project!

Note that the 64-bit version is not open source.

KolibriOS (https://kolibrios.org/en) is an active fork of the open source 32-bit version.

I believe I run MenuetOS once over decade years ago. Now it's 26 years old since its first release. I can only be jealous of such stamina and wish it prosperous years ahead.

Has it had any commercial success?

I remember stumbling uppon Menuet when it was still 32 bits only, (probably around 2006?). I tried it, booting from an actual floppy disk at the time. Nowadays, I don't even know where I would find a computer that still has a floppy disk drive. Time flies.

Interesting license: https://www.menuetos.net/m64l.txt

But this is how you distribute source without accepting contributions! :)

I suppose it's relatively easy to make a compact OS which has barebone hardware capabilities: VGA / VESA framebuffer graphics, SATA, 1-2 NICs, USB2, x64 only. Early versions of Unix were tiny by modern standards. NeXT's GUI worked well on hardware which would be considered a toy today. They all already contained the key features which MenuetOS has. I suppose it's the support of a large number of advanced features (many CPUs, various filesystems, virtual memory + page cache, advanced IP stack, a ton of drivers) that makes a modern Linux kernel large.

I noticed Menuet maybe twenty years ago and I recommended to the forum at the time to put it into a boot manager of some kind, a bit like a backup OS that could read docs and download a file, etc. Don't think they did. Today, I guess it might run from an ESP (efi system partition).

I wish my MBP M3 Max was snappy like that

Previous discussions:

2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38059961

2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37514601

2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31290789

2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28988778

2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15427848

2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9595507

2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6309696

2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1494999

2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=776381

On the one hand it is pretty cool that this exists.

On the other hand ... to me it always felt as if I'd waste too much time writing assembler code. I like being able to express thoughts and ideas, via code, in a more easily manner, e. g. ruby. Or perhaps another language that may be even more expressive (and fast at the same time; I am talking about C-like fastness or even faster, why can't we combine both?).

I also wonder how adjustable MenuetOS is. It looks as if the default theming in all those screenshots is quite basic, always fitting to just one style only. This may be ok in 1980 but I kind of feel that the world moved on, what with HTML/CSS being so dominating everywhere. In fact: any aspect of the OS that relates to design, should be easily adjustable by a user at any moment in time, just as it is with HTML/CSS (JavaScript I don't care as much for - it is a very poorly designed programming language after all).