/g/ has a daily programming thread. I remember the SerenityOS developer used to post webm demos there. I remember seeing plenty of cool stuff.
Someone on /vr/ once started a thread about SNES homebrew and actually made a /vr/ themed one. I wonder what happened to that guy.
If you go look at Andreas’ old videos from 5-6 years ago you can see early versions of Serenity had some sort of shortcut or app specifically for 4chan, with the clover icon and everything.
There’s actually a number of projects that started this way though I don’t know of any that grew up to be as charming and interesting as Serenity OS. Katawa Shoujo is one, though I could definitely see people complaining about the games content. The Tox encrypted messenger is one but I’m not sure that ever went anywhere.
I think most of them, like Andreas, dropped the association with 4chan pretty soon after the project started to gain real traction.
I remember seeing maybe two other operating system projects on /g/dpt/, they didn't reach significant maturity but managed to animate some graphics on the screen. I remember seeing a bullet hell game engine written in lisp, I think it was called gnumako or something along those lines.
This was around 10 years ago...
/dpt/ was where i did a good deal of my learning during university, and the constant /g/entoo posting taught me far more about Linux than I would have learned on my own or through uni.
/g/entoomen taught me a lot about Linux too. The desktop and home server threads also have a lot of gold, people put a lot of effort into their systems. There are even Lisp generals. I remember people attempting the advent of code together and posting progress. There was one person who used a lot of Unicode in the source code.
Just yesterday I saw a rather interesting discussion about WD HDD internals and possible ways to figure out whether they are SMR drives. Shame this hack cut it short.
/tg/ had some seriously good chess players.
There's a board for everything. People see 4chan and think everything is /pol/. If anything, it's /a/. People have been arguing over which waifu is best girl for 20 years. 20 years.