Happy fifth birthday to SerenityOS! The alternative operating system project just posted its fifth birthday summary covering the preceding year, and it’s been yet another good one. The number of contributors keeps rising, and interest remains solid. The Serenity browser, spun out as a cross-platform browser project called Ladybird, has picked up considerable funding and even a few employed developers. SerenityOS itself went 64-bit-only this year, and added support for VP9, WebP, JPEG, JPEG XL, and TinyVG.
The post also contains several short stories from Serenity developers, so head on over to give it a read.
Just a nitpick Thom, the name of the browser is Ladybird, the OS itself is Serenity.
I am absolutely thrilled at the progress they’ve made so far and I am itching to run this on bare metal. I have a feeling it will be a perfect fit for older but still relevant hardware from last decade. Being a teen/young adult just getting into x86 computers in the mid 90s, that’s my absolute favorite aesthetic and one of the reasons I miss BeOS so much. Haiku is great but not daily driver ready just yet; Serenity might just beat Haiku in the race to being a fully functional desktop OS!
I think you may have misread Thom’s comment. To my read, he got the relationship between SerenityOS and Ladybird right.
I have been looking forward to SerenityOS as well but I am wondering how much it will impact the project if the founder moves his focus to Ladybird as he has said he is going to. There are many contributors but it always seems like the big moments that move the project forward come from him.
Luckily, I am perhaps even more excited for Ladybird these days Their pace of progress has been very impressive. Ladybird score 319 at html5test.com right now which is higher than Internet Explorer 11! You might think that is a low bar but it is amazing. They spend more time on rendering. I could not leave this comment on Ladybird as it does not properly submit multi-line text inputs. If they fixed that, I would use it today on many sites, including this one. The next thing they need to do is to speed up JavaScript which is seems they are starting to do now.
One thing I would really miss moving to SerenityOS is containers. If I had the time, I would try to create a Linux distro that was the Linux kernel with literally everything else from SerenityOS. I would even want to port their C library. So it would be the Serenity window server for example and GUI system for example. As a user, you might not even realize that it is not SerenityOS other than that it would work well on lots of real hardware and have better filesystem support.
It has been edited since I made my comment, I’m paraphrasing from memory but it was something like “The Serenity Browser, spun out as a cross-platform browser project, has picked up considerable funding…”
The word “browser” was capitalized in the unedited copy making it seem like the name of the browser was “Serenity Browser”.
Anyway it’s an easy mistake to make and Thom corrected it, no harm no foul.
I tried booting the nightly images … but they just crash? not sure what I am doing wrong there, I was trying to boot them in QEMU on windows… that “should work”. I think.
I can’t speak for Windows but it builds and runs from the git repo on Void Linux just fine for me. Just make sure you have all the build deps satisfied under WSL2 and it should build and run in one go. Subsequent runs will boot much faster (at least they do on Linux).
What nightly images are you referring to? I am not familiar with those.
I was under the impression that you still had to build the project from source. I build the Ladybird browser probably every other day to check on its progress. I read this story on Ladybird initially. To build Ladybird, you need the entire SerenityOS source tree and so I build SerenityOS about once a week as well. I have not encountered it not building or crashing. That said, I am building it on Linux and have. I think I may have built it on Windows long ago but I could actually be misremembering that ( I did it over lunch at work and remember it being a Windows laptop I was using at the time but I also bring Linux laptops to work frequently and I may have done it on one of them ).
>JPEG XL
Already more advanced than Chrome!
I love the look of Serenity and the aesthetic they’re going for. But remind me: why are they building this from scratch rather than building a new desktop environment in Linux?
I was ready to say “the 90’s called, they want their desktop back…”, but after building and running this from the repo, all I can say is that it’s awesome. I still don’t appreciate the gray brutalism, but there are other themes. I really wish the web browser worked. Most pages just crash. I’m looking forward to its release. I’m so tired of Linux. Always the same problems. So I usually use FreeBSD for a stable desktop.