SPARC machines have generally used Sun's SunOS, Solaris, OpenSolaris or derived as Illumos, but other operating systems such as NeXTSTEP, RTEMS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Linux have also been used.
In 1993, Intergraph announced a port of Windows NT to the SPARC architecture, but it was later cancelled.
In October 2015, Oracle announced a "Linux for SPARC reference platform".