February has been a busy month for Redox, the general purpose operating system written in Rust. For instance, the COSMIC compositor can now run on Redox as a winit window, the first step towards fully porting the compositor from COSMIC to Redox. Similarly, COSMIC Settings now also runs on Redox, albeit with only a very small number of available settings as Redox-specific settings panels haven’t been made yet. It’s clear the effort to get the new COSMIC desktop environment from System76 running on Redox is in full swing.
Furthermore, Vulkan software can now run on Redox, thanks to enabling Lavapipe in Mesa3D. There’s also a ton of fixes related to the boot process, the reliability of multithreading has been improved, and there’s the usual long list of kernel, driver, and Relibc improvements as well. A major port comes in the form of NodeJS, which now runs on Redox, and helped in uncovering a number of bugs that needed to be fixed.
Of course, there’s way more in this month’s progress report, so be sure to head on over and read the whole thing.
As always, I am surprised by how few comments RedoxOS attracts here. While there are over two dozen comments on the recent Haiku post, I am the first commenter here after days of this post being available. How is a true micro-kernel operating system delivering things like COW filesystems and Vulkan rendering not more exciting to people here on OSnews?
The fact that RedoxOS can now run things like rust, cargo, clang, llvm, gcc, and node.js is evidence that the foundations are starting to firm up. Relying on projects like uutils for the userland and COSMIC for the UI means that RedoxOS is going to present a great user experience. Both these projects are young but they are improving extremely rapidly with mainstream Linux energy.
And relibc, which could see use outside RedoxOS someday, improves significantly with every release.
Most importantly, the list of contributors seems to be growing.
At the pace things are improving, it seems reasonable to expect that RedoxOS will emerge as a real operating system option by the end of 2026. Hardware support may take some time yet but not all use cases require that.
LeFantome,
To be fair, I think it’s because Thom didn’t mention that Redox was inching closer to release 🙂
I agree these are significant developments, but few people have the inclination to change operating systems at this point. I am guilty of it too. Although I clearly see the merits of RedoxOS, I’ve stopped playing with new operating systems as a hobby years ago. I am so heavily invested in linux now that it’s hard to see myself starting over with a new OS..
I believe that if the world were being introduced to Linux and Redox at the same time, attention and market share would be spread more evenly. But being late to the party is an incredibly strong penalty. Even if the work on Redox warrants attention based on it’s own merits, merit was never going to be enough to overcome established power dynamics. It’s the same deal with windows/android/ios/etc. Grabbing people’s attention in established markets is notoriously difficult. Often times being popular is simply more important than being best. :-/
Maybe we can find a way to make it interesting and challenge ourselves to try more alternatives. It’s funny that Linus Tech Tips is having a Linux challenge right now to see if it can replace Windows. They are decades behind the Linux curve (which always seemed funny to me because you’d think a guy named “Linus” would be more proficient, haha ), but hey that’s ok. Their motivation for doing it is that they hate the direction Windows is going in, which I do appreciate. Windows keeps getting worse for users, enough that some are compelled to try alternatives.
While I do experience problems with linux, so far nothing’s compelled me to seriously look at switching to something else. Linux generally does what I need. Hypothetically if I found an OS that worked flawlessly across more ARM devices, it would be a killer feature for me. I’d ditch linux for an OS like redox if it could solve this. Alas all the operating systems seem to be having the same hardship.
Performance benchmarks often catch my attention and I’d certainly be curious to see how Redox compares.