[skissane]

One thing that makes TempleOS less approachable is the extreme idiosyncrasy of some of its design decisions - e.g. limiting it to 640x480 with 16 colours even though supporting higher resolution and colour depth would have been little extra work, an intentionally very garish user interface, refusing to implement any networking support for ideological reasons. It was never going to be a mainstream OS, but it might have attracted a larger community of tinkerers if it were not for those decisions. (There are forks which improve some of these aspects, but a fork is never going to be as popular as the original.)

That said, extreme idiosyncrasy is relatively common in schizophrenia.

[kqr]

Well, that doesn't seem to stop users of fantasy consoles, so I'm not sure it's as a big problem for a userbase as you think.

[AlecSchueler]

It's the idiosyncrasies that make it notable surely.

[ahahahahah]

It's not notable.

[unixhero]

It is notable for its intended use of the random number generator - Terry envisioned that it was a number chosen by his God. If you follow that path and reasoning through, you see what he meant with the OS being a temple.

[AlecSchueler]

Then why is it frequently shared and discussed etc.? That is, frequently noted.

[wiseowise]

Because internet loves mystery and hype?

Ask your colleagues if they heard about, and if they heard about it what is noticeable about it.

Majority of internet see “Ooh, that’s not Linux, Windows, Mac and has a lot of custom things written from scratch”. And also funni racist genius schizo.

[AlecSchueler]

I'm pretty sure none of my colleagues have heard of the James Webb Space Telescope either but I'd still say it's a notable thing. You're conflating mainstream fame with notability. Honestly I doubt many of my colleagues are familiar with Linux either (I work in a supermarket).

[whstl]

What GP says is unfortunately true, though.

From talking with other people online, most people and articles fetishize the disease and the posts with racist words, and never really paid any attention to the OS itself.

Which to me is the saddest part. Before Terry started being banned from every place in the internet, he was chatty and always trying to drum up interest from others in hobbyist communities. Almost nobody paid attention (perhaps because everyone was also trying to do the same for their own OS), and those of us who did eventually got burned for obvious reasons. And the worst is that most people still don't care. His personality, his death, his disease, and his different practice of faith became more famous than the work he cared about, and that's all laypeople talk about. In HN people at least have a realistic view of TempleOS.