Redox keeps improving every month, and this past one is certainly a banger. The big news this past month is that Servo, the browser engine written in Rust, has been ported to Redox. It’s extremely spartan at the moment, and crashes when a second website is loaded, but it’s a promising start. It also just makes sense to have the premier Rust browser engine running on the premier Rust operating system. Htop and bottom have been ported to Redox for much improved system monitoring, and they’re joined by a port of GoAccess.
The version of Rust has been updated which fixed some issues, and keyboard layout configuration has been greatly improved. Instead of a few hardcoded layouts, they can now be configured dynamically for users of PS/2 keyboards, with USB keyboards receiving this functionality soon as well. There’s more, of course, as well as the usual slew of low-level changes and improvements to drivers, the kernel relibc, and more.
I do not know why Redox does not get more love on this site. It is certainly one of the more interesting OS projects out there and it is coming along quite fast now. It is really going to be a milestone when they get COSMIC working on it completely.
But its gaols are quite a lot higher than the desktop. It is very interesting to me that they see themselves as perhaps a better base for Linux virtualization for example. You can see the ambition in details like creating their own from scratch COW filesystem so early in the project. That is a massive project on its own. And a Rust based C library–quite an innovation.
It is interesting that Redox will use both uutils and COSMIC as both of those are now going to be battle tested in the Linux ecosystem. That is going to bring a lot of polish to the Redox user experience. So, the Redox project can really concentrate on the plumbing.