Comment by hgoel

I've felt that AI has made this issue a lot less painful. I too have dabbled in hobby OSs a lot, but dropped them around getting drivers and the basic userspace setup, because implementing all the legacy interfaces just kills the fun and the alternative is being unable to do anything meaningful with the OS. Porting the GCC stack to your OS is very rewarding initially, but then it's just reading musl/newlib source code and making your syscalls emulate what they expect, which is far less rewarding.

But, since you can delegate a lot of the grunt work to AI now, I think it becomes a lot easier to have it either, write the legacy stuff for you, or port software over. That way you still have the ability to design a system with the things you think would be interesting, while still having some possibility of running "real" software under it.