After six years of development, I am very happy to finally announce the 1.0 release of ToaruOS. While I would not consider this "complete" - there is still much work to be done - it is time to refocus my development, and with that comes the time to declare a stable release. ToaruOS 1.0 has been the result of over half a decade of effort, with contributions from a dozen people besides myself.
For the full release notes, please see the release on Github. I'll keep things to-the-point here.
ToaruOS is a hobby operating system for x86 PCs, with a built-from-scratch kernel and a mostly-from-scratch userspace. The primary vision for ToaruOS has been building a rich graphical environment on par with modern full-scale operating systems. To that end, ToaruOS features a fully functional compositing windowing system. ToaruOS also includes a dynamic linker/loader, a port of Python 3.6 (in which most of the graphical applications are written), a package manager (with packages for many pieces of third-party software available, including GCC/Binutils, and Doom), and a Unix-like terminal. ToaruOS is currently 32-bit only and does not support SMP, which is part of why I am putting out this 1.0 release - it is time for me to focus my efforts on a 64-bit SMP port, but the challenges involved there mean that it is better left as a major goal for 2.0.
ToaruOS is free software, released under the NCSA/University of Illinois License, which is effectively the same as a typical BSD 3-clause license. This license was chosen because, at the time of ToaruOS's conception, I was a student at the University of Illinois. ToaruOS also ships with third-party software under various different licenses which you may find in Applications > Help > Go > Topics > Licenses. Other packages installed through the package manager may be under additional licenses.
From the release on Github, you may download a normal live CD (toaruos.iso) or a netboot version which downloads its userspace from my website on boot. The former is recommended for most users, the latter is more of a tech demo. VirtualBox or QEMU are the recommended environments for running ToaruOS, but I would love to see what sorts of real hardware people can get it working on - I've gotten pictures of Pentium 4 laptops I've been told ran things quite nicely.
. Congratulations.
