Guest post by This is, in a way, a mature OS with an ecosystem and an aftermarket. (Which, we feel we must explicitly spell out, means that quite a few of those third-party applications and drivers will cost you money.) There are emulators that will let you run 20th century Acorn apps that you can find online, but this isn’t an emulated vintage environment like Amiga Forever. It’s not meant for running games from thirty years ago. This is a native bare-metal OS, built on 1980s roots but updated for 21st century hardware. It’s also not an experimental project with little practical use, like Redox OS or Serenity OS, interesting though those are.
↫ Liam Proven at The Register
I grew up with RISC OS and still run a RISC OS machine to this day. As Liam Proven explains affectionately in this article, while as an operating system it’s missing many features we now take for granted (memory protection, pre-emptive multitasking, compositing), some of the user interface ideas it implements still manage to feel advanced compared to modern-day desktops (no need for menu bars, no clunky file dialogues, elegant mouse button assignments). The fact it’s found a home on the Raspberry Pi and continues to support an active community is testament to its enduring appeal and the amazing work of the RISC OS Open project.
Some additional notes from Thom: this new release supports 7 ARM platforms, most notably the Raspberry Pi Zero, 1, 2, 3 and 4 (but not the 5), and it even supports WiFi on the 3 and 4, which is an absolutely incredible achievement. The number of fixed bugs and addressed issues is massive, and there’s even more to come later during the year, as The Register’s article notes.
I was waiting on this release to spur me on to buy a new Raspberry Pi (my only other Pi is our Pi-Hole), so I’ll definitely be on the lookout for a good deal. This release deserves my full attention for OSNews.
No WiFi for the RPI Zero W?
Damn. That’s the one I’m currently using.
That’s exactly what most people will want Risc OS for, quite bizarre. I looked into Risc OS on RaspberryPi a couple of years back, I was very interested because for me diversity enhances security.
If you can get your device off the mainstream OS and onto something more obscure it’s unlikely to become a mainstream target, at least not until it has already become ubiquitous in the marketplace, which wasn’t the issue for my projects as it was about niche applications, applications that needed some public face but wanted to be as secure as possible, by offering little hacking reward for maximum hacking effort.
The RPi Zero W *is* supported, that seems to have been lost in translation somewhere.
For completeness, the WiFi integrated onto any of the 32 bit capable Pis are supported: Zero, Zero 2W, 3, 3A+, 3B+, 4B, 400, and Compute Module 4.
If that’s true, then I know what I’m doing tomorrow!
The problem will be when 32-bit support is dropped from the RPi. As far as I know, RISC OS can’t run on 64-bit ARM.
Picked up a RPi 400 a while back, mainly because of the form factor and the idea in the back of my mind of trying out RISC OS. I should have some time this summer or Fall to test it out and maybe even write an OSNews article on the topic. 🙂 Hopefully by that time the new release of RISC OS Direct will be out so I can test out all the things!