Help Mizu.

Mizu is a small desktop operating system with a 90s soul, on a kernel written from nothing. It has windows, a web browser, a video player and an App Store, and it boots on real PCs. One person builds it. You can make it better without writing a line of kernel code.

31 March — Trans Day of Visibility. The page is wearing different colours today.

Try it and tell me what broke

The most useful thing anyone can do. Every machine is different, and Mizu has only met a few of them.

Write the image to a USB stick with Rufus in DD mode or balenaEtcher, and boot from it with Secure Boot off. Nothing on the machine is touched unless you run the installer. No spare machine? It runs in QEMU, as the install guide shows.

Then write and say:

• the machine: maker, model and year, or the QEMU command line;
• what worked: screen, keyboard, touchpad, sound, network, USB sticks;
• what did not, and what you did just before;
• a photo of the screen if it stopped with a message.

Stutters and freezes are best caught with Event Viewer (Start → System Tools): save its report and attach it.

Write an app

Mizu programs are plain C. The SDK builds them on Linux, and the App Store carries them to every Mizu machine. There is a C library (musl) for ported code, so many small Unix programs build with few changes.

• Writing programs — the first one, step by step;
• Desktop apps — windows, controls, menus;
• Packages — getting into the App Store.

Small games, tools, a calculator you like better than mine: all welcome.

Translate it

Every word Mizu shows comes from one plain text file per language. English, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech and Greek are there. Copy the English file, translate what comes after each =, and send it. The translation guide has the rules.

Fix things in the system

The kernel, the drivers and the desktop are all in one repository. Good places to start:

• drivers for hardware you own: network cards, Wi-Fi, USB 3 controllers;
• programs ported through musl;
• the help pages, which explain Mizu to people who just want to use it.

Send a patch by email or a pull request. Small and focused is easier to take than big and sweeping.

Tell people

Show Mizu to someone who would like it: a friend who misses the 90s, an OSDev forum, a retro computing chat. A screenshot of a hobby OS playing a video says more than this page can.

Support it

Mizu is free and will stay free. It is built at night, between university and everything else, by one person without an income. If it made you smile, a coffee keeps the kernel going.

Where

← koi