Upcoming thread: Temple OS vs Zorin 16.
He suffered from delusions of space aliens and government agents that left him briefly hospitalized for his mental health issues.[1][3] After experiencing a self-described "revelation", he proclaimed that he was in direct communication with God, and that God told him the operating system was for God's third temple.[1]
Nope, not touching this one.
Yes he definitely had mental issues. Schizophrenia to be exact. But I think he kind of made a marvelous software. Even though he was mentally ill, he was sort of a genius. I think that's why other people among me, took interest in his work.
Also can't believe I actually started this discussion 
But I'd suggest people to give it a shot. It really baffles me how he was able to make the OS as a whole. It is just unbelievable and I don't think a similar thing has been achieved before.
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Motivation is a powerful thing. It is true that at times we can admire the resultant work of any person, no matter the personal issues in their lives.
But it can strain rational discussion: example; Reiser.
I would opine that a discussion that includes (the possibility of inclusion of) Religion or Politics head for The Lounge however.
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I agree. In my opinion, his [Terry Davis'] mental problems make his work even more of a marvel. The disparity between his ingenuity and his madness was what really attracted me to him.
For anyone who wants to catch up on his life, there is this high quality documentary done on his life called Temple OS, Down the rabbit hole. I recommend this to anyone who wants to know who Terry Davis was and what really made him dedicate 19 years of his life to develop an operating system to talk to God.
From a technical perspective, he had some very genuine philosophies. For instance, he made TempleOS from the ground up on low level code (Assembly if I'm not mistaken) and he wrote all of the code by himself. He did not use any libraries, pre-made functions, etc. He even made a coding language called Holy C (That is the actual name) for TempleOS. It is very similar to the language C.
I used TempleOS for a while (but not as a primary OS 
It's not viable and it is not its purpose) on a Virtual machine and right off the bat, I was amazed with how good it was working. From the screenshot's that I'd seen, I wanted to pull my eye sockets out but after trying it out myself, I got used to the UI and UX very quickly. That was very shocking for me. It's worthy to mention that the OS is incredibly fast. It is by far the fastest OS I have ever used. It boots under a second and immediately, the user can interact with the system.
It has a lot of unique features that make it stand out. For example, it can display all sorts of GUI elements in the terminal/compiler/etc. And it did all of that in real-time. So you can have a gif of a cat in your code
Also I'd say it has the best 'on boarding' experience I've ever seen on any OS/Platform. When I opened TempleOS, I had no idea how to operate anything because it was incredibly different from anything that I've ever touched before. Like something from a different planet. But despite all that, it had interactive tutorials for everything. So the OS itself taught me everything by itself. There was a lot of automated and interactive tutorials on basically every subject. So it quickly taught me how to operate it and I found it amazing. Because in every OS, at one point I had to use external help on how to operate the system.
I'd suggest everyone to give it a try on a VM. It is a very good piece of software to try out.
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I found a very brief article on this topic:
http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/
I really like this quote that the article points out:
"What if we didn't treat our mentally ill people like animals? What if we brought kindness and compassion to the table?"
That line is very interesting, to me. Some mental illnesses bring a certain element of Danger. To either individuals or to a society.
Some are quite harmless. A mental illness (I really think it could use a different name, too... "illness" already sets the reader up to a negative mindset) is something that a person has no choice about having.
So, I apologize for the tone where I said, "Nope. I am not touching this one." I think that it is clear that my kneejerk reaction was one of Bias.
Reading multiple articles on Temple OS reveals the brilliance of the design and the dedication to the work. Regardless of his Direct Motivations, the function and flow are something many developers could take a long list of lessons from.
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That is very true. I completely agree with you Aravisian. A person does not choose to be born with illnesses and instead of outcasting ill people, they should be helped get integrated better into the society. Outcasting someone does not help them get any better.
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One great thing about Temple OS structure is that none of the code is compressed/encoded, so the whole code can be easily browsed while in the system as if the user is opening a .txt file. As a matter of fact, a user can directly modify the OS/Kernel code on in real-time while in the OS. I don't think I've ever seen such thing on even slightly complex software.
I really hope the good practices done in TOS can get popularized and get adopted by other mainstream developers. There are a lot of good things to learn.
Actually, I just checked and was really surprised by how many good temple OS forks there were. There were ones that add networking, let GUI desktop environments run on TOS kernel and more. I'm really happy to see people continue his work.
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I wonder if some of those brilliancies only work at the level of interface that Temple OS provides, though.
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I'd say it is more because he had all of those in mind when he started developing the software.
It's a bit hard to imagine some of the tos features in mainstream software because they have already been fully developed. But I'd say a mainstream software could be developed with all these features if the developers take such features into consideration when they start developing their software.
Regarding the Temple OS interface I'd say that looks are deceiving Temple OS has all the important modern UI interfaces and features. You can primarily use your Mouse or Keyboard (or both) to navigate the UI. There is multi-tasking, windowing, context menus, visual effects, animations, and all sort of other things. It really doesn't look like it when looking at the screenshots but they all are there.