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Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't running TempleOS in VMWare completely ruin the aesthetic??? Pretty surprised by that part.

When I heard about LoseThos I thought it was really bad ass. Like people who build their own house from scratch and live in it. The idea was to strip it down and get close to the metal.

But if you're running it in VMWare, you basically have an entire OS underneath, a bunch of opaque code... doesn't fit IMO :/

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It's very difficult to write an OS that runs on the bare metal of an arbitrary computer. One advantage of virtualization is that hardware differences are normalized, and you only have to write a few drivers.

If I was to write an OS for fun I would probably target something with fixed hardware like the RPi.

It's not terribly hard -- no harder than a platform like Raspberry Pi -- if you're fine with sticking to a standardized subset of PC hardware.

That typically means using an older, slower standard for accessing the hardware. For example, you might use VESA BIOS Extensions for graphical video output, and be limited to a 1280x1024 framebuffer, rather than write device-specific drivers which would give you access to all its GPU acceleration capabilities.

You could run it in an ESX bare-metal hypervisor, giving you most of the benefits of virtualization without a whole OS running "underneath".

Even with the RPi you're going to need USB support if you want simple things like keyboard input.

The host "OS underneath" isn't visible to the VMware guest OS unless it uses special interfaces - which I'm fairly sure TempleOS doesn't. So TempleOS still has to do the hard work of dealing with the "hardware" that VMware is emulating.

I've run TempleOS on bare metal before. Getting it installed can be a bit fiddly (e.g. finding the right io ports for the CD-ROM), but it worked for me.

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