I’m no stranger to weird operating systems. I’ve run Tails from a USB stick (an OS that blew the lid off the NSA) and installed a 50 MB operating system to revive a decade-old PC. And I thought I’d seen it all.
Turns out, I was wrong. There’s a whole world of experimental operating systems out there that most people have never heard of. So I loaded up my Ventoy USB drive and spent a weekend testing four of the strangest ones I could find.
Some of these systems, like ReactOS, don’t play nice with Ventoy or modern hardware. I had to fire up a virtual machine to get them working.
ReactOS
The Windows clone that’s been cooking for 27 years
ReactOS is what you get if Windows went open-source. The developers at ReactOS tried to recreate Windows from scratch without using any Microsoft code. The goal is to create an operating system that can run Windows apps without actually using Microsoft’s venerable OS.
I tested ReactOS in a virtual machine, and honestly, the setup felt like traveling back to 2001. The blue text-based installer looked exactly like Windows XP’s setup screen. ReactOS can run most older Windows 32-bit applications with a varying degree of success. Firefox and 7-Zip worked fine, but anything that needed modern libraries crashed or refused to start. You can download the apps from the web or use the built-in Application Manager, which has a catalog of vetted apps.
After nearly three decades of development, ReactOS is impressive as an open-source alternative to Windows. But is it something you’d actually want to use as a daily driver? The answer is no, it’s not quite there yet.
Damn Small Linux
Old hardware’s best friend
Damn Small Linux (DSL) was the answer to the question “how much can you pack into 50MB?”. The original version fit on a business card CD and proved you didn’t need gigabytes for a working desktop.
The project went quiet for years, then came back in 2024 with a 700MB version. It’s built on antiX 23 i386, which means it’ll run on ancient hardware—first-gen Intel Core chips, Pentium 4 desktops, stuff you probably forgot you still had.
I installed it on my old Dell Inspiron with 4GB of RAM. It booted in less than 15 seconds from the power button to the desktop. Honestly, impressive for a decade-old laptop.
DSL comes with its own set of pre-configured apps that range from web browsers to open-source office suites and file managers. The system picked up my network card, sound, and USB devices automatically, so you are unlikely to run into any hassle with drivers.
Damn Small Linux is designed with one goal: to breathe new life into aging computers that would otherwise end up in a landfill. While it excels at that, it falls short as a full-fledged desktop OS, missing too many modern conveniences to be practical for everyday use.
Haiku
BeOS lives on
Haiku keeps BeOS alive. If you don’t know what BeOS is, it was a multimedia-focused OS from the 90s that showed a lot of promise before disappearing in 2000. Haiku’s been recreating it with modern hardware support ever since.
Haiku looks basic but boots fast. However, that’s not surprising, as you would expect it to beat Windows’ boot time with what it has on offer. It has almost no loading screens or progress bars and jumps straight to a working environment, which is unlike anything else (except BeOS).
The Deskbar on the side of the screen is the original BeOS code. When Be Inc. shut down, they open-sourced two components. The Haiku team grabbed that code and built everything else around it.
It comes with the WebPositive browser pre-installed, which, again, like most lightweight operating systems, struggles with rendering modern web pages. Browsing anything that’s not built for Internet Explorer is a struggle on WebPositive.
Haiku is unique to a fault. Despite active development and recent updates, the lack of support for modern web means it’s impossible to do anything useful on it. But if you like to tinker with operating systems as a hobby, Haiku will certainly keep you occupied.
Redox OS
Chemistry jokes included
Redox fits the definition of a bizarre operating system because it’s entirely written in Rust, instead of the more conventional C/C++ that powers most modern operating systems like macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Since every component, including the kernel, drivers, desktop environment (called Orbital), and even the C library, is written in Rust from scratch, it loads incredibly fast, faster than Pop!_OS. This is important for an operating system promising to be an effective alternative to Linux.
Redox has a familiar interface to other Linux distros and comes with a bunch of apps pre-installed, including a File Manager, calendar, a Minecraft client, and even a free and open-source game called FreeDoom, a first-person shooter that uses the same engine as Doom.
However, it’s still a highly incomplete operating system with inconsistent usability. Many of the included apps don’t work, the right-click context menu for the desktop doesn’t exist, and there’s no Settings app.
Redox OS is still in its early stages of development with a promising future. But in its current form, it’s only suitable for experiments. However, if you are curious about what the future of operating systems could look like, Redox is a good place to start.
Sometimes weird is just what we want
None of these operating systems will replace your daily driver. ReactOS can’t deliver Windows compatibility yet. Damn Small Linux works for old hardware but struggles with anything CPU-intensive, and Haiku keeps a dead OS alive. Finally, Redox explores Rust at the OS level, but it’s nowhere near ready.
So, why do these operating systems exist? Because developers found them interesting enough to build. They’re passion projects that sacrifice practicality for experimentation. And honestly, sometimes that’s the best reason to create something unique.