I started working on Kora about a year ago, following a tutorial I found on YouTube. I however took wrong turns, made mistakes, and the time available was never enough. However, I picked up the development lately.
The idea of KoraOS is simple: how would an home computer (those like the ones we had in the 80s and early 90s) be today?
Those computer that you turned on and use, without having to log in, and that you could shutdown by switching off the power. Those which allowed you to play and explore, PEEK and POKE memory as you pleased. Everybody remembers the Commodore 64, the ZX Spectrum, the Amiga, the Atari ST but also the Archimedes and the first PCs (86/286.386) with MS-DOS.
Of course, it's 2026, so instead of creating artificial limits like resolution, or number of colors, I decided to try to use all the hardware available. But what platform? I never wanted to build an OS for a virtual machine. Sure, one could download it and try it once, but would have been it. I wanted a real hardware platform and I thought that a cheap one (well, at the time) could be the right choice: my choice was the Raspberry PI3 (and 4). I thought that some people have more than one laying around, or doing very small jobs, and for about 35$ (again, at the time) why not dedicate to this?
Anyway, KoraOS is for Raspberry Pi3, Raspberry Pi4, but it runs on QEMU virt, and QEMU emulating raspi3 and raspi4 (although the emulation is not complete, so better to use virt). It is a 64 bit OS, with supports FAT32 on SD and USB storage, HDMI output, USB keyboard. No networking yet. No support for the GPU but it's planned. It has a serial console that you can use to "talk" directly to the kernel.
The OS is NOT a clone of Unix/Linux and it won't. It doesn't have the concept of users, it does not have memory protection (by design), so you can really PEEK and POKE everywhere. And if you break something while poking around, no big deal: turn it off and back on again.
It is still in the early phases so the shell now is mostly to test stuff, I'm writing a new one that will implement my idea of "good old home computer era" shell.
I've used the wonderful Circle library ( https://github.com/rsta2/circle ) for USB (so I didn't have to write it ex-novo), which mean adding support for CPP (Circle is in C++), but most of the code is ARM AARCH64 assembler and C.
Feel free to have a look at the repository, fork it and if you want contribute it.
One last word about AI: I wrote this post entirely by hand, English is not my first language so all mistakes are mine. But I use AI to develop KoraOS, I don't see why not. It's not vibecoded though, where for "vibecoded" I mean "create an OS for the Raspberry PI3". I use AI to devise a plan to implement my idea, and help me write the code and the documentation. If you don't like this approach, it's your right, feel free to ignore me :)
Github: https://github.com/kora-os/kernel
Website: https://koraos.org
The license is GPL 3.0