You can run RISC OS on a Raspberry Pi which is also ARM based.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/01/risc_os_open_moonshot...
... And I'm still talking with ROOL about the directions they're examining. The restriction may no longer hold true.
EDIT: especially that you can use it to do multiple menu selections without actually closing the menu.
The neat part was you could "save" from one app into another, without having decided to actually save the file yourself yet at all.
I have to echo the comments about the mouse button "Adjust". Being able to move windows about while they preserve depth position without some obscure shortcut was very useful.
Over the years I've grown to appreciate the extent to which whatever vision there may have been behind RISC OS originally the lack of a proper GUI toolkit and serious OS internals held them back such that by Win95 Windows really was better. At exhibitions in 94/95 Acorn devs themselves were conspicuously more interested in running NetBSD than RISC OS, and it always seemed a shame they didn't make a more serious effort to get some descendant of the RISC OS desktop ported over to a UNIX like kernel, rather like a more serious shot at the ROX desktop, but in truth Win95 won the late 90s desktop paradigm war convincingly.
There is a "moonshot" effort to redo the internals of RiscOS from RiscOS assembly.
https://www.riscosopen.org/news/articles/2025/03/28/moonshot...
https://www.riscosopen.org/content/documents/risc-os-moonsho...
I'm honestly of the view the wisest thing to do would be focus on making it play well with being emulated, right down to enabling enhancements when doing so (such as graphics acceleration), but then not being in that world it really is not my call at all.
ROX-Filer is still to this day my file manager of choice for any X11 system.
They had a UNIX clone in 1988. The guy that did the kernel, Mark Taunton, used it for his daily driver until some time after 2000 but they never ported their GUI to it.
The internals of riscos were creaking by the end; it didn't have a proper library system and only had cooperative multitasking. There was an internal project ('galileo') to replace it, but it suffered from second system effect and NIH and never saw the light of day.
Are you referring to RISC iX? I had no idea there were serious users of that to be honest.
A few years ago some Acorn strategy documents leaked from the early 90s and it showed they basically knew the game was up long pre-Risc PC. I don't think any number of people would have helped them by 1992. There was this odd void where everyone (such as Xara) kind of knew the PC was going to take over everything, but it just wasn't quite there, and then suddenly it was.
They kept going for a period by virtue of owning ARM. When the shareholders persuaded them to list it directly, the game was over. Before that they bet on set-top-boxes and the supposed PC replacement, the NC (thin client).
I was thinking about this the other day. It seems to have come to pass with smart TVs and consoles like the PS5.
Probably the closest thing we have is a Chromebook.
> This menu however is deeply confusing.
No, this is the greatest piece of the RISC OS UI. It makes all other systems save dialogs seem like total nonsense. You just put files where you want them. The only thing is that the OK button shouldn't exist.
Burger menus are just rotated tab bars that can adapt equally badly to mobile and desktop.
(I hated that O2K feature and so memorised where to go to turn it off.)
Virtually every FOSS desktop environment out there feels very firmly built on the Windows and OS/2 tradition, and there is very little indeed that comes from any other tradition.
The ideas of boldly experimenting with alternatives seems to be confined to "hey, what if we moved the default button into the title bar?"
Things about its low-level internals? Specific aspects of how its parts inter-operate? Particular nifty features in the UI? General look & feel / user experience?
teddyh•8mo ago
• <http://toastytech.com/guis/indexriscos.html>
• <https://guidebookgallery.org/guis/riscos>