ArcaOS is an operating system you might not have heard of, but you will recognize it when we tell you that it’s the direct descendant of IBM’s OS/2. It’s just received a major update, and delivers this persuasive argument for its uptake:
“How about a commercial operating system which doesn’t spy on you, does not report your online activity to anyone, and gives you complete freedom to choose the applications you want to use, however you want to use them?”
We’re guessing that a higher-than-average number of Hackaday readers use open-source operating systems, but in a world in which the commercial OS everyone loves to hate is ever more turning the Play button into the Pay button, we have to admit that’s attractive if you pay for your software.
This update, version 5.1.2, brings support for the very latest UEFI systems to the table, keeping the platform alive in a manner we’d never have guessed would happen back in the 1990s. It’s true it’s a 32-bit system rather than 64-bit, and you’d be unlikely to buy it for your high-end gaming machine, but we remember OS/2 Warp back in the day as being very nice indeed and particularly stable. We’re interested enough to have put in a cheeky request for a review ISO, so should that come off we’d love to give it the Jenny’s Daily Drivers treatment.
ArcaOS has been mentioned here before. Do any of our readers encounter it in your daily lives? We’d love to hear in the comments.
How about a commercial operating system which just lets me get day to day tasks done, without having to spend afternoons reading through artistic screeching of artists arguing on forums whether some kernel wankery is better if done through
ballsornutsackmodule; or distro-hopping every few months? FFS I just want to print a single-page document or use a mouse, not study Silberschatz’s book again.ROFL
Doesn’t even have to be commercial though. Ubuntu or Fedora will enable you to do pretty much anything, right outside the box, without ever reading a manual except for learning how to use the package manager. I’ve never understood the distro-hopping people can get on.
Given the thread topic, by default right out of the box, Ubuntu reports your usage back to Canonical.
and no, you can not turn it off without first A) knowing it does this, and B) looking up how to turn it off. aka reading a manual.
Also, ever since red hat obtained ownership over Fedora, are you absolutely sure it doesn’t spy on you too just like red hat does? I am not absolutely sure.
Might as well stick with windows. At least your exe’s are somewhat more likely to run.
“Reporting usage” is dishonest. The data collected includes hardware details (CPU, RAM, GPU), OS version, desktop environment, and BIOS information. This data is not supposed to contain personal identification, and all reports can be reviewed locally in ~/.cache/ubuntu-report/ before or after they are sent.
That seems like the type of information they could collect once during the installation, ask (again, during installation) if you want to share it, and then never report anything ever again.
But I bet it doesn’t do it that way, and that should make us all wonder why not…
As far as data collection goes, and because they have no commercial purposes, they must be amongst the least worse of all OSes. Gentoo provides one with even more control on which software to accept according to their license (you can block all proprietary software/firmware) but it also needs a lot of reading to use correctly and not break things.
It’s a nerd thing. Some people really geek out about os’s. Some people are looking for community so they jump on trends, or need to reinforce their status in a community.
If you are happy with what you have then you have succeeded. I’m a fan of the two you mentioned for normal computer stuff. I also like popos for computers with big gpus. Makes the set up process really easy. Even though I don’t care as much for popos otherwise. I’ve lost days of my life to dealing with Nvidia/Linux drivers after updates. Not worth it anymore. Centos/rhel/rocky for servers are probably my top choices as well.
To me technologies are tools to accomplish goals. I’m not much of a cultist, or philosophical purist, but there are a few that I just like more than others.
I share your pragmatical point of view entirely. I understand if people want to have fun with different distros, that’s a perfectly fine hobby. However if you want to get work done, it’s also fine to stick to something that just functions flawlessly. I used to have fun with gentoo, but driver updates got in the way of the fun. I’m entirely satisfied with either Fedora or Ubuntu.
About the distro-hoppers, I guess is a newbie thing, maybe it’s because I’m old, but i kinda settled on slacware for my desktops and debian for any embedded/server style thing, but when i made this choice you kinda only had Slackware, Debian and RedHat (and Mandrake, and Kurumin, and Yggdrasil…)
I use two different distros on a variety of computers (Arch and Debian) both have been incredibly stable. Never really distro hopped. Sounds like PEBKAC
Great comment! Thanks for the chuckle
Personally, I use the
packermodule to sub for both types of sack-management.Artists? You think ARTISTS spend their free time arguing on forms about OS kernels????!?!?
That’s a remarkably effective way to signal that whatever you have to say can be disregarded out of hand. Surprised you didn’t blame “woke” or some other dumb shit.
I have been using Linux since about 98/99. I have no idea what you are talking about. I’m on my 4th distro and only changed because the options became available, not because I had to
there are those of us which find the windows problem unacceptable and linux untenable. of course the problem with a third option is that i know linux better than it. granted now is the perfect timing for third options.
32bit is a hard pill to swallow. Otherwise I completely agree. Also from a cyber security standpoint, some diversity will not hurt.
that is an issue. in this day and age 32 bit is for microcontrollers. im not even sure reactos has 64 bit yet. its hard to take an os seriously if it cant run modern hardware.
ReactOS has 64-Bit. The Win64 API is very close to Win32 API.
But ReactOS doesn’t have WoW64 subsystem yet, to run 32-Bit applications on Windows 64-Bit.
It’s been worked on, though. WINE is a possibility, I read.
OS/2 Warp 4.52 could run Java, DOS and Win16/Win32s applications, besides native OS/2 applications.
It also featured an early speech recognition that worked offline.
With Odin project, OS/2 can run Win32 text/GUI applications on Windows NT/2000 level, at very least.
So running IrfanView, XNView, Winamp or other common Windows utilities is possible.
In addition, it supports DirectX and OpenGL and some emulators such as Neko Project can run on it, for example.
https://tinyurl.com/3z437zkr
Sound input works, too.
https://tinyurl.com/fy77wkvp
It also features an optional application installer, named WarpIN.
It has a standardized package format and shows dependencies (if any).
Linux platform lacks a standard executable format and a standard package format so far.
Ecomstation and ArcaOS support that too, but even more.
They have *nix ports of Firefox and similar.
The compiled binaries communicate via TCP/IP, so the network stack has to be installed.
Last but not least, ArcaOS has new drivers over the predecessors and can boot on UEFI systems.
So it can boot on modern hardware that can’t boot DOS or Windows 98/XP anymore.
It’s a way of running DOS and Windows 3.x applications on such modern hardware, without resorting to VM software.
If it’s like Warp 4.x, then DOSVDMs might still be able to talk to physical i/o ports (if config sys: iopl=yes).
That’s because OS/2 had more flexible DOSVMs than Windows NT had.
Text/CGA applications can be configured to have 736KB of conventional RAM or have VGA being emulated/passed through, if needed.
OS/2 had so many settings for DOS and Win-OS/2!
Win-OS/2 could even load certain Windows 3.x drivers, if they weren’t nasty VXDs.
ArcaOS might be interesting to those who are looking for a ReactOS alternative.
Or those who grew up with DOS/Windows paradigms and don’t feel home in the Linux world.
There might be various reasons. Each to his/her own. :)
OS/2 1.3 was a nice operating system. In the late 80s I developed a real multi threaded data acquisition system with gui front end on a 386 that accepted data from 8 RS-232 DUTs and sent the data collected over Ethernet to a VAX cluster for analysis and loading into an Oracle database which then downloaded the report back to the workstation for printing . Worked flawlessly and replaced expensive VAX minis that had been doing the job.
I used OS/2 1.1 on an AT 80286 with 2meg of ram. just to format floppy’s . 1 track/s
while playing other stuff on the next console. funny day’s at he time!
The following article about installing software on ArcaOS was released just last month (08 Feb 2026):
https://articles.os2voice.org/category/software/32-installing-software-on-arcaos-as-on-windows-linux-mobile-phone.html
“Or those who grew up with DOS/Windows paradigms and don’t feel home in the Linux world.”
Having grown up with DOS+Windows but switched to Linux as a young adult… this concept is baffling to me. I was one of those people that was really upset when Mickeysoft took DOS out of Windows. But for all the same reasons I hated that I can’t imagine not preferring Linux.
I do remember the first time I saw a Unix commandline… it seemed so weird. And I didn’t understand why someone would prefer that over the DOS commandline that seemed at the time to be so much more commonplace. But that didn’t last very long at all. I got over that quick when I learned some of what it could do!
$139 for a personal edition license.
and with only 1/2 year of support so no new versions with bugfixes or security fixes after that (?)
Looks like XP and Snow Leopard had a bastard lovechild.
+1
Genuine LOL
That interface predates both…
“How about a commercial operating system which doesn’t spy on you, does not report your online activity to anyone, and gives you complete freedom to choose the applications you want to use, however you want to use them?”
How about Linux?
On eMule you can download Windows 11 ISOs modified to remove copilot, telemetry etc.
The new monopoly after Windows? :)
How about trying to keep things a bit heterogenous in the world, especially in regards of networking?
Running Linux everywhere is like raising a monoculture,
which can be devasting because it can lead to erosion of the ground (foundation).
Unless Wayland gets real cool real fast about allowing better options for simulated input to enable tools like Lazy Nezumi Pro to function then it’ll never actually take over.
I work in an animation studio and the virtual keyboard and input situation in general is always miserable.
Choices. The name of the game. I choose Linux. PI OS for my RPIs and KUbuntu for my servers, laptops, and desktops. Some prefer lock-in like M$ OSs or Apple. Maybe gives those users warm and fuzzies, I don’t know… but at least there is an OS out there for everyone’s need/want. ArcaOs my be the dream of someone else. I liked OS/2 in it’s day. Never caught on with the company I worked for at the time even though we tested it with our software. Face it, I liked VMS, CP/M, DOS, and even Windows back then. But then Linux came along and it pulled the right strings. Plus my pocketbook stopped bleeding… Anyway, choice is good. And in the Linux world we have plenty whether it is a distro or DE or tools. And rock solid. It’s great… for me.
We used OS/2 too for embedded systems, for example controlling rather expensive CNC mill. During one of those “integration trips” organized by our company there was a bit of a weird thing. The night after we all got dead drunk, one of the boys was sleeping, and I uh, reached out and played with his dick. I liked it and it was really turning me on.
Agreed. people seem to miss this one “feature” of the open source world – choice. You don’t like #1, them go and try #2-#10.
This new “there can be only one” mentality is driving me nuts. If a developer writes a piece of software, which has only one other user in the world, and he enjoys developing that software, leave them alone. Choices are always good.
im mostly still on windows because lazyness. but im using 10 ltsc as a stopgap until i can find a distro i like. linux is always better than the last time i used it. windows hasn’t been that in ages.
Choice is great…till one is trying to do a sales job on the rest of the world and pushing “this year is definitely going to be the year for mass desktop migration” then one finds out how overrated choice really is.
Sure, choice gets in the way of sales. It has always been thus.
Without a million lemmings all running the same direction, there’s no money to be had as a value-added reseller. But, what of it?
Value is relative, and subjective. If I find value in it, I may use it. But probably not, because my needs are far from average.
I thought they took away OS/2 because we demonstrated we could not have nice things.
Any product that reports usage through a back door is hackable. Ergo Your personal details are at risk.
All OS es are already compromised by default.
Example most ” security updates” may involve ” moving the backdoor and changing the locks” how ever the software houses are compromised. Microsoft is a good example…so many ways to attack the os even with third party threat detection and elimination ( antivirus etc.)
Due to points 1&2 most of above discussions are moot.
In short, everything is compromised.
I dispute. Not all OSes even have network support.
IMHO, sell it for $35 tops and undercut Ze Monopoly where it hurts the most. Price it at about the level of a 1990s videogame (relatively speaking, the $35 USD in the 1990s is close to $75 USD today, but you get the idea).
Linux Mint otherwise, and DietPi where I need tiny footprint (which is really lightweight Debian). Challenge me to something that does better AND potentially can be scaled slimmer than DietPi while still capable of running some kind of unwieldy memory-leaking beast. Oh, compete with Apache Nuttx and see where that goes (still not the best free/open embedded RTOS, but good enough to undercut for-profit kinds).
HaD should give you your own column!
And monkeys should fly out my butt.
That was in response to a post that has since quite properly been deleted.
biggest rip off ever. OS/2 should be dead and opensource end off