I hear you. Pains me it won out instead of i960 with an emulation mode for backward compatibility. Far as learning on x86, there's two counterpoints come to min

I hear you. Pains me it won out instead of i960 with an emulation mode for backward compatibility. Far as learning on x86, there's two counterpoints come to mind: 1. Most sample code out there for "real" OS's might be x86. Most projects that aren't embedded will target it. So, might bite the bullet for that reason. 2. Other reason is if the end goal is to improve software on x86 hardware. As in, learner explicitly wants to take advantage of high-performance, x86 chips or code. A shortcut might be porting more sample OS's to non-x86 CPU's. They learn each thing for simple architecture followed by ugly one later. Alternatively, abstract away what one can like Fluxkit project did. That was how a number of OS's were built in high-level languages without having to redo all the low-level stuff.