Many moons ago, around the time when Andreas formally resigned from being Serenity’s BDFL, I decided that I want to get involved in the project more seriously. Looking at it from a perspective of “what do I not like about this (codebase)”, the first thing that came to mind was that it runs HERE points at QEMU and not THERE points at real hardware. Obvious oversight, let’s fix it.
↫ sdomi
There’s no way for me to summarise this cursed saga, so just follow the lovely link and read it. It’s a meandering story of complexity, but eventually, a corrupted graphical session appeared.
Now the real work starts.
> it runs HERE points at QEMU and not THERE points at real hardware. Obvious oversight
This wasn’t an oversight from Andreas, it was intentional.
> let’s fix it.
Wish them best luck to them
I agree it was intentional but I do not think Andreas was against working on real hardware. It just was not a priority for him. He wrote SerenityOS as a kind of therapy or “happiness project” and worked on things he found interesting. That led led to it own C and C++ libraries, a full GUI, crypto libraries, and even full applications including a web browser.
The web browser turned out to be more interesting to him than the OS it was created for. Sadly, Andreas has stepped away from his own OS project and Ladybird, the browser, no longer targets SerenityOS.
SerenityOS is worse off without Andreas I think but a possible silver lining is that his departure is that it makes it easier for others to step in to work on things that were not a priority for him–like drivers for real hardware.
One thing that was very much intentional by Andreas was that you cannot “install” SerenityOS. Instead, you have to build it. That is a lot easier to do with a virtual machine than real hardware. Perhaps the project will broaden its horizons a bit in this respect and they will create installers at some point that more people can experience.
Sorry but the only reason we ever cared about SerenityOS was Andreas. It was his hobby and work. It works fairly well on supported hardware (it is east to get to run on a dual P3 tualatin with a VIA chipset as well as olmost all SIS chips ever made from pentium onwards including the latest 775 stuff. After that era you are like haiku stuck in VESA land.
I agree, once Andreas left I stopped caring. I wish them well but I don’t follow the project anymore.
Holy smokes, this is great.