I'm a high school student about to enter tenth grade, and I want to take on an ambitious programming project that could strengthen my future university applications. Building an operating system sounds fascinating. I understand that creating something comparable to Windows 11 would be extremely difficult, but I have about two years to learn and work on it. What books, websites, courses, or smaller projects would be useful starting points?
5 Answers
A good stepping stone is Linux From Scratch, since it helps you understand how a complete system is assembled without immediately requiring you to write every low-level component yourself. You could also try a very small kernel for a microcontroller or retro-style machine first. A realistic two-year goal would be a simple bootable system with a command line, basic multitasking, and perhaps a rudimentary filesystem—not a Windows 11 replacement.
Read *Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces*. It's available free online and explains processes, virtualization, concurrency, filesystems, and resource management. It won't teach you to build a modern desktop OS by itself, but it gives you the concepts that are easy to overlook when you only focus on displaying a window.
Break the project into tiny, demonstrable goals and expect each one to take longer than planned. Modern operating systems represent decades of work by large teams, so the valuable part of the project is what you learn and can show: design notes, source code, tests, and progressively better versions. That will make a stronger project than claiming to have recreated a commercial desktop OS.
The OSDev Wiki is probably the best place to begin. It covers bootloaders, kernels, hardware, memory, filesystems, and plenty of other fundamentals. Keep in mind that writing an operating system is not usually considered a beginner project, so start with small milestones rather than aiming directly at a Windows-sized system.
Before attempting a serious kernel, spend time learning C, some assembly, computer architecture, memory management, and how processors work. Rust can also be useful, but C and assembly are common foundations for OS development. Networking, filesystems, synchronization, and allocators are additional subjects you will eventually need to understand.

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