These 3 vibe-coded operating systems could be another Windows alternative one day

Published Nov 3, 2026, 1:30 PM EST Sydney Butler is a technology writer with over 20 years of experience as a freelance PC technician and system builder and over a decade as a professional writer. He's worked for more than a decade in user education. On How-To Geek, he writes commerce content, guides, opinions, and specializes in editing hardware and cutting edge technology articles. Sydney started working as a freelance computer technician around the age of 13, before which he was in charge of running the computer center for his school. (He also ran LAN gaming tournaments when the teachers weren't looking!) His interests include VR, PC, Mac, gaming, 3D printing, consumer electronics, the web, and privacy. He holds a Master of Arts degree in Research Psychology with a minor in media and technology studies. His masters dissertation examined the potential for social media to spread misinformation. Outside of How-To Geek, he hosts the Online Tech Tips YouTube Channel, and writes for Online Tech Tips, Switching to Mac, and Helpdesk Geek. Sydney also writes for Expert Reviews UK. He also has bylines at 9to5Mac, 9to5Google, 9to5Toys, Tom's Hardware, MakeTechEasier, and Laptop Mag. While giant corporations are going all-in on AI, using it to replace staff, crush human content production, and generally set things up to enrich themselves even more, regular folks are realizing they can use AI to eliminate their reliance on these companies. People are using AI-powered reverse engineering and hacking tools to remove spyware and ads from their TVs, to create legal software clones of expensive professional tools, and to crack open video game consoles and games and give them features their makers wanted to monetize one day. However, an operating system is a totally different kettle of fish from a simple video editing app. You wouldn't vibe code an OS, would you? Turns out that plenty of people have done just that. Kaan Şenol’s VibeOS "Not everything works, some stuff is not even tested..." Credit: VibeOS This is a hobby OS that runs on ARM64 CPUs, has its own kernel and a graphical desktop. According to the VibeOS GitHub page, this was achieved with at least 64 Claude Code sessions, from scratch. You can download it right now and get it running on a QEMU virtual machine, or you can run it on a Pi Zero 2W. It runs DOOM, because everything does, I guess. In all seriousness, looking through these vibe-coded OS projects, it looks like being able to run DOOM is like a rite of passage in this community, because you see it over and over again. That does, however, underscore how amazing this is. Remember that it took huge sums of money and thousands of hours by professional software developers to create an OS that could run DOOM the first time around. This was built by one man in a cave, with scraps! Well, and a hyper-advanced AI coding assistant. SlopOS Slop by name, slop by nature Credit: Slop Labs You can tell by the name that SlopOS is in on the joke, but behind the self-deprecation there's a real and functional operating system. You can see in the photo above that the creators got SlopOS running on bare metal, without a virtual machine. You can almost hear the triumph in the "This Is Not QEMU" description of that image. What's even more impressive is that the apps you see on that screen are being rendered by the three "kernel wizards" using their own Intel display driver. They wrote their own TCP stack from scratch too. This is all seriously impressive stuff. Then there's the "Wheel of Fate." The OS is deliberately coded to make every boot a gamble. Whenever you turn it on, you have no idea if it's going to work. Wow, this one is really trying to be Windows. gdoct’s VibeOS I think the name's already taken Credit: gdoct Whoa, Déjà vu. Yes, here's another "VibeOS," but I guess having names that lack originality in the vibe-coded OS world might actually be somewhat poetic. Either way, whoever coined this name first, gdoct's VibeOS at least has a sick logo. Credit: Gdoct That's pure bumper sticker material if I've ever seen it, but like SlopOS, the casual vibe covers some serious software achievements. It's another from-scratch project, and this OS can boot via UEFI just like a proper modern OS. It also has its own "WAN grade" TCP stack, and the biggest news at all is that this VibeOS can run unmodified. Linux binaries. Of course, since the Linux kernel is open source, you don't need to do any reverse engineering to achieve that last bit, but that doesn't mean it's easy. Reading through the project documents, this feels like the closest thing to a prototype for a real future OS, and it's also openly licensed, like many of these projects. I suppose in some cases the idea is to get that initial scratch-built prototype out, and then hope a community forms to support it. ​​​​​​Maybe one day your OS will be more personal than you can imagine Obviously, none of these are examples of software that's ready for any sort of serious or useful purpose. However, these are operating systems. Bad and buggy ones, but they qualify in every way that matters. This is frankly revolutionary, because if making an OS from scratch was easy, everyone would do it. Not even Microsoft created MS-DOS from scratch; they licensed and ultimately bought 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products, an OS originally known as QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) that sounds a lot like what we've seen above. But the time gap from AI starting to sort of help with coding to where it can create or reverse engineer an OS was short. Which suggests that, in the hands of savvy software engineers (or complete madmen), we could soon be looking at alternative OSes that don't suck. I can even foresee a future where you create your own OS according to your needs, and something designed specifically for you and your hardware is coded overnight, ready to use the next morning.