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The domain
nyxos.cc and its renewal. The site itself is static and hosted free on GitHub Pages, so the domain is the whole hosting bill.
Support
NyxOS is free, and stays free
Every line of NyxOS is GPL-2.0 and always will be — the kernel, the desktop, the browser, the compiler. Nothing is paywalled, nothing is planned to be. This page exists for the people who want to chip in anyway, and for the ones who would rather help without spending a cent.
Transparency
Where the money actually goes
A small, boring list — because that is the honest one. There is no company behind NyxOS, no salary, no roadmap that unlocks if a goal is hit.
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Real hardware to break
QEMU is not metal. Cheap second-hand x86 boxes, USB sticks and a serial cable are what turn "boots in an emulator" into "boots on your laptop".
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Every expense, in public
Spending goes through Open Collective, where the ledger is public by design. If money comes in, you can see exactly where it went.
If you want to fund it
Three ways, all of them small
One euro is a real contribution here, not a token one. Pick whichever platform annoys you least.
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GitHub Sponsors
Recurring, from $1 a month, right where the code lives. Cancel any time. This is the one that makes development predictable.
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Ko-fi
A one-off tip, no account and no subscription. The fastest option if you just booted NyxOS, liked it, and want to say so.
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Open Collective
For anyone who wants the receipts. Contributions and expenses are both public, line by line, on a ledger nobody can quietly edit.
Free, no strings
Take the wallpapers with you
NyxOS paints its desktop background from code — integer arithmetic only, no image files, no floating point anywhere in the kernel. We compiled that exact painter against an ordinary framebuffer and rendered every combination: 144 wallpapers, twelve styles across eleven base colours, at 1920×1080 and a natively-rendered 4K set. Not screenshots — the same pixels the OS puts on screen.
Free, GPL-2.0, 2 MB, no email required. If you end up keeping one on your desktop, you know where the tip jar is.
Costs nothing
The help that is actually worth more
An OS with no users is a demo. These are ranked by how much they genuinely move the project — and every one of them is free.
1
Boot it on real hardware
Write NyxOS.iso to a USB stick and boot a machine you do not care about. Then tell us where it stopped — the first line that did not appear is the whole bug report. Real-metal reports are the single most valuable thing anyone sends.
2
File the bug properly
An issue with the QEMU command line or the machine model, plus the serial output, gets fixed. A screenshot of a frozen screen usually does not.
3
Star and share it
A star costs one click and is how anyone else ever finds this. Posting a screenshot of the desktop somewhere is worth more than a euro, measurably.
4
Send a patch
A driver, a shell command, a wallpaper style, a typo in the docs — all of it counts, and contributors are credited in the log. Start from CONTRIBUTING.md.
Straight answers
The obvious questions
Will any of this ever go paid?
No. NyxOS is GPL-2.0. The licence is not going to change, there will be no "pro" build, and the ISO stays a free download. Funding buys speed, never access.
Do sponsors get to steer the roadmap?
No, and that is deliberate — a hobby OS stops being fun the moment it has clients. Sponsors get thanks and the same public issue tracker as everyone else.
What if nobody ever donates?
Then NyxOS carries on exactly as it has for its whole life so far, just slower on the hardware side. This page is an option, not a dependency.
Is this a company?
It is one person and a compiler. Contributions are personal support for a hobby project, not a purchase, and they come with no warranty or obligation attached.
Or just come and watch it get built
NyxOS is developed in the open, one verified increment at a time. The Discord is where the kernel-dev chat happens, and the repository is where every increment lands.