GitHub - SerenityOS/serenity: The Serenity Operating System 🐞

The story behind Senerenity OS is quite amazing:

It was October 2018 and I had just completed a 3-month rehab program at a state addiction clinic in Sweden. I was unemployed, staying with family, and had basically nothing going on.

With no drugs or other vices to pass the time, the days seemed impossibly long. I struggled to find activities to fill them. I enrolled in school for a while, but it wasn’t for me this time either. Eventually I turned to programming, since it’s always been my big interest in life.

Until that point, my career had been focused on web browsers (WebKit at Apple & Nokia). However, I had always been interested in low-level things so I began tinkering with some of that. I wrote a little ELF executable parser.. And an Ext2 filesystem browser.. And a little GUI framework with an event loop..

Out of this tinkering, an operating system began to take shape. I chose the name SerenityOS because I wanted to always remember the Serenity Prayer. I was quite worried about my future at the time, and I figured that this name would help me stay on the good path.

My general idea was to build my own dream system for daily use. It would be a combination of my two favorite computing paradigms: the 1990s GUI and the no-nonsense command-line of late-2000s Unix.

Source: https://awesomekling.substack.com/p/i-quit-my-job-to-focus-on-serenityos-full-time

The author was a guest on the Changelog podcast. The episode was an interesting one, I highly recommend it
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source: The serenity of building your own OS
Episode webpage: https://changelog.com/podcast/554
Media file: https://op3.dev/e/https://cdn.changelog.com/uploads/podcast/554/the-changelog-554.mp3
I will never not be impressed with people who get themselves off drugs and have endless respect for that.
Sounds like Terry Davis but the good ending

Wait, so that's a proper *NIX system? A non-linux system? That's quite impressive!

Yes and they implement EVERYTHING in house. In case you haven't heard they also started implementing a browser engine from scratch https://ladybird.dev/ just for fun. It kinda took off and they even got some nice donations, just to keep it going and see where it leads.
The "founders" youtube channel is quit interesting. Especially the monthly update videos if you want to keep up to date with the latest developments. https://inv.tux.pizza/channel/UC3ts8coMP645hZw9JSD3pqQ
- Yikes.
  Building everything from scratch is one thing.
  Maintaining it is completely different.
- tried it out in a VM, I was truly impressed by that browser.
  I mean, sure, lots of pages don't work, but lots of pages DOES work on it, with no issues.
  Never seen this on any custom, "built in" browser of an alternative OS.
- Wow, a whopping 100k from Shopify, that’s awesome!
- Does the browser work yet? Can’t find screenshots

Why do groups insist on BSD/MIT/Apache style licensing...

I don't know about the creators of this project, but in general: So that they can use the stuff in their closed source applications while finding enough contributors to write software for them for free.
Here's why.
Because I like the 2-clause BSD license. I am not a fan of “copyleft” or forcing obligations on people in general. I want my software to be available for anyone who wants to use it.
- He missed the entire point of copyleft which is a bit disappointing.
  All well, at least it is libre. I respect his choice in the end as pressuring or forcing someone to use a copy left license us just as bad as proprietary software
- They all bear the same permissive properties
For some software, where EEE tactics aren't a concern, but corporate adoption matters, these licenses make perfect sense. However. that's not the case here: an OS is a prime target for EEE.
What is your issue with the licensing?

Is it possible to run it in VM?

Edit: it’s meant to run on a vm. cool!

Quite easy. It automatically starts in qemu when you build it.

I read "senility operating system" which is stupid and also probably the OS I have installed

Amazing project.

I was just trying to boot it up on bare metal yesterday, on an AMD Phenom II machine but Kernel Panic'd on not finding a device to boot from, which was a bit puzzling. Unfortunately had no time to investigate, but I won't give up, I make it boot somehow on that PC.

Or try to run it on a Raspberry Pi 400.

- There's nothing like that is enabled AFAIK, I"m not even sure this board has UEFI (only Legacy BIOS). It's an Acer Veriton M421G brand PC, with a Phenom II X4 945 CPU.
  Not even sure it's compatible with the OS, but this boot device issue was strange, tho. (had the same problem booting up a partition manager software from floppy that is based on Visopsys)
  But will double check everything. Thanks for the tip!

How does it compare to TempleOS though?

[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
- Oh, so it's already corrupted by sin, I see
- Whoa whoa slow down with this new-fangled fad ideas. Next you'll try and tell me every user process doesn't run in ring 0.

His coding videos are really nice to see. I don't even understand that much, as it's mostly C++, but the coding, the explanation, and the final feature and commit is somehow relaxing.