SkyOS is a commercial operating system developed by Robert Szeleney. It has existed since 1996, and development and testing is underway currently for version 5.0. It was free in its early stages, but is now commercial. A LiveCD release has been promised for the near future.
It features SMP support, an integrated media subsytem and a 64-bit filesystem. Its filesystem is a modified version of OpenBFS, though recent changes in SkyFS make it incompatible with the original.
It is mostly POSIX compliant, and comes with the majority of the GNU tools, including GCC. Due to its POSIX compliance and port of the GTK toolkit, many Linux or other UNIX applications have been ported, including AbiWord, Gaim and VideoLAN, as well as a number of games, such as OpenTTD and Quake.
As of 2004, SkyOS has drivers for a wide enough range of hardware to run on most PCs. Some types of devices are not supported, such as printers and firewire devices. Although SkyOS has good support for most graphics cards in 2D accelerated or VESA modes, it lacks the ability to take advantage of the 3D hardware found on modern graphics cards like nVidia's GeForce and ATI's Radeon range; although 3D software rendering is supported, it is considerably slower when compared to hardware accelerated 3D, but more than adequate for most tasks.
SkyOS has applications for most common desktop computing tasks, a full office suite is currently in development. Recently, Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 have been ported. As with any new OS, the availability of niche applications is limited in comparison to other operating systems such as Windows, Mac OS X or Linux.
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