Important! Halt of new official Steel OS development

As of today, 2023 November 6th, any future releases of Steel OS from me will be cancelled, and there will be no more development done on Steel OS. This may sound like a dumb idea and a crazy move, however, allow me to explain why I'm going to be suspending Steel OS development indefinitely and eventually, stop supporting Steel OS in general.

One of the main points I want to mention here is that there is a bit of false advertising of the software. Steel OS is not actually an OS (operating system), but an operating environment, and even still, it has very severe and extreme limitations holding it back. A "sister" project to Steel OS, known as Nanami OS (stylized as NanamiOS), named after Nanami Madobe, does NOT have such limitations, and begun development a few weeks ago on 2023 October 26th. Since then, NanamiOS has seen rapid movements forward in development, including both functional keyboard and mouse drivers, and currently, PCI support. As Steel OS was developed using a "simple" visual programming language, it does not have such luxuries. Plus, NanamiOS is bootable - Burn a disc image containing the OS to a CD, insert said disc into a computer, and it will boot up, albeit without support for most system components. But, I will also note that NanamiOS uses multiple standards used in Steel OS development, so at least I can, sort of, say, that Steel OS is an ancestor to NanamiOS.

Some other reasons I'm pulling the plug on Steel OS has to do with its technical limitations and issues. There are MANY issues with Steel OS, like, for example, it can't tell whether or not the system is powered by a battery, so it just assumes you're using a laptop. But, that's not a very big problem. What are some big problems is that Steel OS has an absolutely TERRIBLE API, as even I found developing software for Steel OS to be rather challenging. Programs like text editors, drawing programs, web browsers, and more programs like that, basically require it to be the only program of that kind open to actually start, plus, developing some types of programs is literal CBT in visual programming languages: Here's a great example of what I'm talking about: a calculator program is extremely easy to make in Python or C++, or at least, a text-based calculator. But, with Scratch or TurboWarp, given you're forced to use a GUI, and if you don't want to use one, it will make everything look like you're making the program for a room full of 1st graders. I thought it wasn't possible to make a GUI-based calculator in Scratch, but here I am, I proved it! And, it's kinda buggy. That's because I had to manually implement every single number display into the visual language GUI, and writing that was very painful (I mean, it's more than 300 BLOCKS, holy crap!!).

Apart from the pain-in-the-neck API, Steel OS was poorly documented from the beginning. Barely any comments in the code, and no help articles or even a help program. Since then, I've made much better practices in making it easy to understand and use my software, an example being SteelDOS (which also will be put on hold indefinitely). NanamiOS, though it doesn't have any help articles at the moment, has a help command mapped to the F4 key that TELLS you what the OS can do! What makes things worse, is that Steel OS has the most complex code, and everything is basically INTERTWINED. Kyaa, I didn't think I'd be making this announcement on an unhinged rant!

Overall, I'm kinda glad I'm moving on from Steel OS. Steel OS 3 will continue to get support until NanamiOS is in a state where I can put out a proper release.