OSDev.org

Okay I use to aspire to develop an operating system, but I no longer want to make one from bare scratch. I might like to make a shell or window manager soon, or certain individual components of an OS, I still have some interest in those. Right now, I'm in the middle of reading a tutorial on making a text-based adventure game that uses class-based functions.

There are certain other projects I have in mind for the future. These are a simple game implementation, a GUI program that generates 3D shapes with simple effect/filter presets. I'm also getting a little into the idea of Web programming applications.

I also have questions for future reference:
- Even though X is only a system that manages backend functionality for an actual window interface, does X itself have it's own set of basic routines for drawing elements of windows?
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Yes.

Here's a starting point: https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/X_Window_Programming

Google will provide you with a ton of information.

Get a decent kernel to start from, I would recommend anything UNIX, so you can port over utilities from Linux, FreeBSD, and the like. Linux kernel would work fine, but if you don't want to distribute source changes, use any of the BSD distributions (the code in there has a less liberal license, and is generally tidier to work around). Learn your way around the kernel, bring in utilities and programs (watch out which utilities you bundle with a BSD license, should you take that route; GPL utilities bundled in a BSD licensed OS might ruin privacy for you) and start writing your own bits and pieces wherever you need it. Learn how to use xlib (or create your own drawing library, it's up to you) and develop a window compositor. The possibilities are endless if you know where to start.

Hey, thank you for the advice, everyone.