Hardware support and requirements

Will they even work on your computer?

Another aspect that keeps these Oses from becoming mainstream is their lack of hardware support. On the other hand, on compatible hardware most of them will outperform your favourite Linux distro.

For instance, Visopsys can power a graphical desktop from any Pentium computer with 64MB of RAM. The OS supports all variations of the FAT filesystem and has read-only support for ext4. In terms of peripherals it supports PS/2 and USB input devices, IDE and SATA disks, and Pcnetethernet cards.

Similarly, you can run Reactos on any Pentium-class x86 machine with just 256MB of RAM. Reactos collaborates with various other projects such as Haiku for its hardware support, which is still fairly limited in comparison to some of the other Oses in this roundup.

Kolibrios isn’t much different either. It’s a 32-bit only OS and requires miniscule amounts of resources. Its developer claims it’ll even run on machines with the original Pentium processor. The OS supports USB 2.0, and quite a few popular Ethernet devices

as well as Radeon and Intel graphics drivers. Openindiana needs a 64-bit computer with at least 4GB of RAM for decent performance. The project also hosts a community-maintained list of supported peripherals, which is fairly detailed.

Haiku produces images for both 32- and 64-bit machines. The project borrows its Ethernet and Wi-fi drivers from FREEBSD, via a KPI compatibility layer. They’ve been upgraded to those from FREEBSD 11.1 and support the Atheros 9300-9500 families, Intel’s newer ‘Dual Band’ family, some of Realtek’s PCI chipsets, and newer-model chipsets in all other existing drivers.