SerenityOS: Year 3 in Review

by ingve • 5 years ago

251 46 5 years ago

1_player• 5 years ago

I so wish this could become an operating system a dedicated hacker could use full-time. I think the biggest hurdle is fleshing out their web browser, which is probably the hardest thing to build and maintain in this day and age.

But my secret second wish, is that the whole UI side of SerenityOS could be ported in its entirety to Linux. Finally, for the first time in decades, a pragmatic kernel with a pragmatic user interface. I would happily ditch GNOME, KDE, Sway, i3, Wayland, Pulseaudio, pipewire, Freetype2, Network Manager and the other myriad of components of the current Linux UI stack for something designed with passion and a coherent vision.

I am thankful SerenityOS exists and Andreas is working on it full time, well done people!

hyproxia• 5 years ago

I so wish this could become an operating system a dedicated hacker could use full-time.

Which problems with existing operating systems does SerenityOS solve?

hyperman12• 5 years ago

GUI wise, I'd say focus .

All of gnome, kde, win10 and osx give me an endless stream of distractions. Lots of superficial glitter, but every few minutes something minor bugs out, which is incredibly distracting. Alerts for the dumbest things everywhere. Nanyware. Blah blah something something experience really needs looking at. Oh no updates to install before next week which requires a paternalistic message, no matter if I shut of the computer daily.

The problem isn't what to add, but what to delete. And as win95 was damn usefull with 4mb of RAM, there's a lot to delete.

I'm using KDE as least worst option.

no_time• 5 years ago

The constant schisms in the linux desktop community mean that it's in a perpetual state of various levels of broken. SerenityOS is breath of fresh air if you've ever tried to put a pixel on a screen without relying on an ever increasing pile of abstractions.

Ygg2• 5 years ago

Yeah, and why Serenity OS?

Why not Haiku or something else?

ObscureScience• 5 years ago

I would say that the premise of those are quite different. While both are hobby OSes at this point, my impression is that Haiku is more of a "product" something that the developers want to provide to a general public. Serenity is written just to tickle to itches of the contributors, accepted by the judgement of Andreas. At least from the inception, I suspect that the OS was not meant to be used by people who also don't want to work on the code. But ofcourse motivations may change.

From a development perspective I think this leads to Serenity building just enough of a foundation for the application/feature someone want. When the ad-hoc code starts to smell, clean up and abstract. Then repeat.

rvz• 5 years ago

Finally, for the first time in decades, a pragmatic kernel with a pragmatic user interface. I would happily ditch GNOME, KDE, Sway, i3, Wayland, Pulseaudio, pipewire, Freetype2, Network Manager and the other myriad of components of the current Linux UI stack for something designed with passion and a coherent vision.

All of what you have described already existed in projects like RedoxOS, Fuchsia and Haiku.

Maybe those projects (Including SerenityOS) have more in common of being a complete and unified OS than having tons of fragmented system components and projects competing against each other like what you see in the linux desktop ecosystem.

Apocryphon• 5 years ago

Doesn’t BSD also do that better than Linux too?

Maybe this whole confusion stems from the Linux model dominating the FOSS space when other open source OS’s don’t conform to that approach.

yjftsjthsd-h• 5 years ago

If this GUI stack were ported tok Linux, it would just be another Linux DE. You want coherent, just use and stick to GNOME/KDE/XFCE/whatever; if ~3 options didn't help, ~4 won't. And once it's on Linux, inevitably you'll want to run Firefox (GTK) or wireshark (QT) or whatever, and there goes your coherence.

tejohnso• 5 years ago

Custom OS, custom GUI, custom browser, custom libraries. All from scratch, c++. All working. Within a few years. Very humbling.

I took a few minutes to look at the included snake game because I recently wrote a cross platform snake game using SFML and thought I could quickly get a feel for how things were done. Simply and efficiently, it turns out.

mysterydip• 5 years ago

I like that one of the news posts is on exploits that were discovered. He's not trying to sweep problems under the rug.

seiferteric• 5 years ago

I don't think it's at the stage yet where exploits are worried about. They are even still part of the fun, there is even a playlist on the youtube channel about finding, exploiting and fixing them. I do thing the youtube channel is the reason this project has gotten popular. It even motivated me to make two kernel PR's and drop a ruby port! It was a fun experience and watching some of the videos demystified the process.

mythz2• 5 years ago

One of SerenityOS goals I find as its most compelling USP is that it aims to be a "pure" OS free of any 3rd Party libs/binaries so that everything is in the project source tree and nothing needs to rely on or sync with any other upstream project, resulting in anyone can always fix & test any issue or add any feature immediately. A good highlight of this is in the Diablo port to SerenityOS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOzZ8R4gphE

Whether it's missing C++ APIs, unsupported lang features, missing SDL port impl, toggling kernel features - it all gets done in a 1hr sit down session to produce a shiny new Diablo port.

It was a characteristic Andreas experienced at Apple where all code and expertise for macOS was maintained in-house. This does mean everything inc. the OS, Kernel & all default Apps like the Browser needs to be developed from scratch for SerenityOS, but its Browser is making good progress as seems the SerenityOS project and development approach resonates with a lot of devs where it's been able to attract a vibrant community with a number of active contributors.

I see a number of benefits of this approach starting with SerenityOS has to be one of the best code-bases to study and learn about OS development where you can see how all components integrate together in a consistent code-base (as well as being able to follow it being developed in real-time with 100s of videos on youtube.com/andreaskling), it enables cohesive behavior and appearance with everything using the same singular library set, it's easier to implement OS spanning features like being able to capture full-system profiles in its profiler, the code-base is easier to improve and refactor with full static code analysis and no need to maintain legacy/frozen ABIs.

skybrian• 5 years ago

That seems nice for educational purposes, but what would happen once it became popular and many applications were built on these API’s? Then it’s not a closed world where you have all the source anymore. Backwards compatibility with existing apps becomes a big issue.

papacho• 5 years ago

That's correct however the purpose of the project is not to become the next Windows or MacOS but to always be a hackable operating system.

easygenes• 5 years ago

Something I really like about watching Andreas work is that he is so comfortable working and talking very clearly through the process. He is at least as proficient as I am when I'm just working, and with the added overhead of talking through your thought process that is rather impressive. It feels like just watching him work improves my own thinking.

buryat3• 5 years ago

I started building this system after finishing a 3-month rehabilitation program for drug addiction in 2018.

not something I expected to read, kudos on turning life around and being open about it

buryat3• 5 years ago

i recommend watching his video, a great and humble explanation from a smart person about his fight with addiction https://youtu.be/j3JkNGKZtqM

buryat3• 5 years ago

He quit his job to focus full time on the project. First time for me supporting a project on github, the author seems to be a good person to support https://awesomekling.github.io/I-quit-my-job-to-focus-on-Ser...

zamadatix• 5 years ago

Quite a ways since the initial demo and HN thread!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE52D-zbX3g

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19537807

arduinomancer2• 5 years ago

Was curious does Serenity use _any_ external libraries?

For example crypto, font rendering, etc

mythz2• 5 years ago

None in the default OS, it uses existing C++ build tools to build the OS, but the OS itself (inc. Kernel, GUI & default Apps) was built from scratch. Including Font Editor (https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Userland/...), rendering and Crypto impl (https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Userland/...).

It does maintain a large number of ports you can install as add-ons to be able to use existing software, tools, languages & games, etc in SerenityOS.

https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Ports

arduinomancer2• 5 years ago

Wow just browsing the libraries directory is impressive

https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Userland/...

notorandit• 5 years ago

Can we do [a] better [OS]? can we improve security and robustness? can we prevent unexpected interactions between applications?

No, you cannot as long as you don't completely ditch all those considerations that lead to the crap that pretends to be an os.

squarefoot2• 5 years ago

I wonder how good it will be wrt hardware support, drivers etc. It's continuously moving target: you support a sound card, a printer or some SDR dongle, all fine and dandy, then two months later a new piece of iron is out and it needs adjustments to the drivers when not a full rewrite, all while maintaining compatibility with the old peripherals. So I wonder if SerenityOS can count on some help by Linux drivers, I mean if they could be roughly taken as a starting point to speed up native support of hardware. Otherwise it would be a really time consuming task.

Narishma• 5 years ago

Last time I checked it only ran in qemu.

ilrwbwrkhv• 5 years ago

If anyone is sponsoring Andreas please use GitHub sponsors if you can as he gets the most money through that.

unnouinceput• 5 years ago

He should put a direct pay to his account or bitcoin or whatever, then he would get all the money without fattening anyone else in the process.

Remember folks, GitHub IS Microsoft, and going through GitHub money you are fattening Microsoft as well.

SerenityOS: Year 3 in Review

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