I used and developed software for RISC OS for many years and it was there I cut my teeth as an open source developer.

I wrote the very popular !Director application which let you customize your Desktop and add lots of nifty shortcuts. It could be expanded with BASIC plugins to do just about anything! It was distributed by the Arcade BBS to start with then Acorn User magazine put it on the floppy disk that came with the magazine.

Amazingly Director was written entirely in ARM assembler (with the help of lots of macros). I used to really enjoy writing ARM assembler and used to grit my teeth whenever I had to read the assembly output of the C compiler! I remember writing quicksort in ARM assembler as part of this (to sort menu entries) which was a lot of fun.

I still have a RiscPC under my desk, but I don't think I've turned it on for nearly 15 years :-(

I think maybe the famous surviving Risc OS application might be Sibelius music notation program.

It’s owned by Avid now but it started as the work of two brothers on an Acorn Archimedes under Risc OS.

https://www.avid.com/sibelius

As someone that grew up using Acorn Archimedes it's hard to express to those that were never involved just how difficult what has been going on here is or how surprising it is they have stuck at it. The overwhelming majority of us had left long before 2000 (even before 1995 really), and it's not as if there were ever that many compared to the Amiga or ST universes.

If you want to know what it's like to program for RISC OS:

https://www.riscos.com/support/developers/prm/

It's impressive how fast it boots up on a Pi. I've tried all the OSs for the Pi and RISCOS is way faster than all the alternatives.

The real value of a niche platform like RISC OS isn't measured by market share, but by how much of its design DNA survives elsewhere.

The original ARM operating system

I think we're getting pretty close to the point where hardware manufacturers can find a niche use case for these OS's - I put ReactOS and Haiku in this set - and build custom hardware just for these OS's.

I mean, I'm pretty sure there is a market for OS's that have not, yet, been encumbered with AI/Ads/spyware/etc.

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