No, it is not evident: this is not correct.

Oberon is bare-metal self-hosted programming system. It is both a language and an OS.

> why do we care about this one in particular?

1. It is the final development in the career of Niklaus Wirth, the creator of Pascal. Pascal is the Wirthian language that had considerable commercial success.

(A dialect called the USCD p-System was one of the original 3 OSes that IBM offered for the PC, for instance. Apple created Object Pascal, and implemented parts of the Lisa and original Mac OSes in it. In the early days of DOS, Borland TurboPascal was one of the leading IDEs, and then when 16-bit Windows achieved commercial success, Borland's Delphi led the way as the most sophisticated Windows IDE.)

2. It's the end of his life's work. Wirth did not stop with Pascal.

The next generation was Modula. It was a bit of a flop, but the successor, Modula-2, was a hugely influential language too. Topspeed Modula-2 was at one time the fastest compiler of all kinds for the PC.

Development did not end there.

Others did Modula-3, not Wirth. He moved on to create Oberon.

3. This is the end of the line of the single most widespread and influential family of programming languages outside of the C world.

> What does it do that other operating systems don't?

Wirth was a keen advocate of small size and simplicity.

https://cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf

Oberon is one of the smallest simplest compiled languages of all time. It is also an OS, and an ID, and a tiled mouse-controlled windowing system. The core is about 4000 lines of code.

4k LOC.

The entire core OS is smaller than the tiniest trivial shell tool on any FOSS Unix.

It is almost unbelievably tiny, it is fast, and it is self-hosting. It can run bare-metal, on multiple platforms, or as a conventional language under another OS. It has its own GUI. It can interop with other languages. You can, and people do, build complete GUI apps in Oberon.

https://blackboxframework.org/

It may be less well-known than its own ancestors but this is an important, significant language, and the final generation of a very important and very much alive dynasty.

https://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/04/22/oberon/

A more in-depth look for folks with some comp-sci knowledge:

https://www.scribd.com/document/377504715/Oberon-the-Overloo...

https://archive.fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/new_type_of_c...

I adapted most of it into an article for The Register:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/26/starting_over_rebooti...

Being provincial. Assuming sentients look and act like us, whoever "us" is. (Cf. whales, or elephants.) Assuming that what "we" do is the right, proper way to do things and anything else is inferior.

Well, I can't be sure about you, but I am and all my friends too.

AI is a scam. SEO is a scam. Blockchain -- all applications, no exceptions -- is a scam. Kubernetes is a scam: it's real, it works, and nobody except Google itself ever needed it. Containers are mostly a scam: they're a useful tool but not a deployment method, not a software distribution method, etc. SaaS and everything aaS are scams: own your shit, keep your own data on boxes you own. Pay for good smart people to run them. Hire old people, and pay enough to keep them. Good techies are not a fungible resource, and tech that makes people more fungible is bad tech.

Being AI advocates is a good sign of scammers, of industrial-scale incompetence, and of entire industries and market sectors to avoid.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47601168

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47601168

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47601168

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47590348

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47601168

It is not. That is the point here.

It's not independent.

If an LLM were able to generate code that can access ext4, then that LLM has to have ingested the original ext4 source code as part of its corpus.

LLMs cannot count. They cannot add 2 + 2. If it can emit code to do something then it contains in its model code to do that thing.

Therefore it is not an independent implementation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Mathematician

5Y ago:

https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/04/waterfox_firefox_fork...

Last year:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/18/firefox_no_ai_alterna...

This year:

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/19/just_the_browser/

I use Waterfox on Linux and one of the things I like the most is that it works with the global menu bar in Unity, Xfce and so on. LibreWolf, in my testing, does not. My experiment with it ended there, TBH. (Neither did Floorp.)

Hopping between Waterfox and Firefox is easy because Waterfox works with Mozilla Sync. I think LibreWolf might not, and I have read somewhere that it disables the Mozilla password manager.

I find Waterfox UI and interop better, so I use it.

Librewolf may be even more private, but the poor UI was a deal-breaker for me. YMMV.

Does this help?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47520510

Taekwindow:

https://ttencate.github.io/taekwindow/

I rarely use Windows but any box I do need to use for a while, I put Taekwindow on it. I only want the Linux feature of middle-clicking the titlebar to send to the back, myself, I don't want or need moving or resizing, but they're there.

https://gitlab.com/haydentech/cosmoe-classic/

This has evolved into a new UI layer for Wayland, on top of Linux...

https://cosmoe.org/index.html

I wrote about it last year:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/25/cosmoe_new_cpp_toolki...