At the time of commenting this comment was totally grayed out at the bottom. That's a pretty dour welcome for a new user to a community that's ostensibly interested in anything that gratifies curiosity.
I've vouched several green user comments in the past six hours that had been flagged and gone to dead for no apparent reason, the GP comment you spoke for was one that others had kicked to dead ( usually I'm flagging obvious spam comments straight to dead ).
Almost always for the worse - for instance now you have this pointless tangent hanging off a topcomment. That's why the site guidelines ask you not to do this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Comments like this are particularly bad because often, as in this case, people post corrective upvotes and then the now-inaccurate complaint lingers on like uncollected garbage.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
You're right, of course, that a legit comment from a new user shouldn't be downvoted, but it's enough to make a corrective upvote yourself and move on; or, in egregious cases, let us know at [email protected] so we can fix it.
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43778319.)
I would recommend checking out https://osdev.wiki to start out if you want to write a kernel, as well as reading relevant specifications (such as Intel Developer Manual and the specs for any drivers you write). I don't really know much about non-x86 kernel dev but most of the concepts are the same as far as I know, just different technical implementations. There's a link to a discord server on the project's readme, there are some very smart people in there who I'm sure would be more than happy to help you out.
Sorry to disappoint you but all I have are some noob questions.
What would be the steps to run this on a laptop? I take it that after building it there would be a process similar to, say, setting up dual-boot in a Windows PC? (Whoa I'm asking a stranger on the Internet how to run dangerous software on my computer...)
If one wanted to undertake such a project, do you have any recommendations of textbooks or other reading material? I had some OS & related courses in university (I'm EE, so computer-adjacent), but they were all very abstract / high level / conceptually-focused. I'd love something more concrete. It doesn't have to be x64.