Documentation and support

Will they guide you through the murky waters?

because Visopsys is primarily designed for developers and students, the bulk of its documentation caters for this group. There’s a lot of information that exposes the internals of the OS, which is a treasure trove for any Computer Science student. Kolibrios also has just enough documentation to help users get started with the OS. There’s a quick FAQ and some how-tos to help boot Kolibrios alongside Windows and Linux, as well as on virtual hardware. There’s also a fairly active multilingual forum for dispensing help.

Openindiana fares a little better. It has a detailed FAQ and an (under construction) handbook, which is still fairly detailed. There’s also a wiki to help users and developers get orientated with the OS. The project surprisingly doesn’t have a forum, so you’ll need to use its mailing lists for your support queries, which is a rather clunky way of doing things.

On the other hand, the Reactos project has a wiki which hosts various tutorials designed to help first-time users install the OS and perform various tasks. The wiki is also home to developer

documentation along with details about the internals of the OS. For support there’s a Mattermost-powered chatroom and multilingual forums.

Similarly, Haiku’s website does everything it can to help orientate first-time users of the OS. It has various introductory documentation including a detailed FAQ, a fairly complete illustrated user guide, along with several other focused guides to help users install, update and virtualise the OS. There are several avenues for support as well including forums, IRC channels, mailing lists and so on.