"You're the OS!" — a browser game that makes you the kernel scheduler
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A game where you're an OS and have to manage processes, memory and I/O events
Hacker News →“You’re the OS!” puts the player in the role of an operating system, tasked with juggling running processes, allocating memory, and handling I/O events in real time. The core tension is responsiveness: leave a process idling too long and the simulated user loses patience and reboots you, ending the run. It’s a playful way to surface the scheduling and resource-management problems that real kernels solve invisibly.
The project is open source under the GPLv3 and built in Python (targeting 3.14, with pipenv for dependency management). It ships as both a desktop app and a web build, and is hosted on itch.io as well as GitHub Pages, so no install is needed to try it. Beyond the basic game, the repo includes a sandbox mode for testing custom stages and an automation interface that lets scripts play the game programmatically — a contribution from a community member.
The maintainer, Pier-Luc Brault, welcomes pull requests against open bug and help-wanted issues, and notably includes an AGENTS.md with rules for AI coding assistants. Assets are sourced from openly licensed work (OpenMoji emojis, the VT323 font, Creative Commons imagery), making it a tidy example of a small, fully open educational tool.
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