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SerenityOS demo at Handmade Seattle 2021 [video]
- Maksadbek 5y agoVery impressive! The GUI is very similar to an old friendly Windows style, did Andreas intentially designed it such way or use some 3rd party framework ?
- stohk 5y agoFrom the github 'SerenityOS is a love letter to '90s user interfaces with a custom Unix-like core. It flatters with sincerity by stealing beautiful ideas from various other systems.' The video in the link, Andreas mentions that its all from scratch.
- breakfastduck 5y agoIt's all built from scratch, but it is clearly influenced by other systems in terms of design. I'm not sure how those two points conflict.
- Synaesthesia 5y agoFrom what I understand about the seminal Apple vs Microsoft case in the 90's, theres a limit to how much "look and feel" can be patented.
- slekker 5y agoEverything is so snappy and fast and feels lightweight, I wish there were Linux distributions focusing on these kind of aesthetics
- Aaronstotle 5y agoI first heard about SerenityOS via HN years ago, it's been incredible to watch Andreas' journey from hobby project to working on it full-time. His hacking sessions on youtube are also great.
- encryptluks2 5y agoA lot of effort, but besides the nostalgia effect I don't see how anyone could take something like this seriously for everyday use. After using a multitude of window managers on Linux, it just doesn't make much sense to me to go backwards rather than forwards.
- joeberon 5y agoThe benefit is that you basically have full control over the entire OS. If a modern software on linux wants to fix a bug caused by the windowing system, they cannot just go in and do a straightforward PR on it without learning that entire community and vast project. In Serenity, most of it can be understood by most programmers. I personally fixed a bug in the volume applet that required adding a new IPC message to the windowing system. This kind of full stack control is rarely seen in an open source context, and so it has a lot of potential.
- plorntus 5y agoIt's not for actual everyday use (afaik it never will be either), it's built for those that want to build and explore a from scratch OS.
- pjmlp 5y agoIt isn't yet another POSIX clone, that is the main difference from Linux right there.
- narush 5y agoVery excited to watch. If you haven't checked them out, I highly recommend checking out Andreas YouTube channel [1]. It's the most interesting programming content I've ever watched - and I feel like he's honestly taught me a lot about programming! [1] https://www.youtube.com/c/AndreasKling https://www.youtube.com/c/AndreasKling
- akling 5y agoWow, thanks for the endorsement! I'm happy to have found a way to share my love for programming with so many people, and it's even cooler when it helps someone improve their skills :)
- girvo 5y agoProps for making it through rehab by the way. I also fought drug addiction, though in a different country to yours! I completely understand the drive to have a coding project as a part of recovery -- I've done the same, though my projects are much less impressive than yours :)
- busymom0 5y agoCan you share a few pointers on how one would go about starting with writing their own OS? I do have iOS and Android dev experience. How does one even go about writing something from scratch which runs on a particular hardware? Is this possible to do for mobile OS? Lets say writing an OS from scratch for mobile?
- erklik 5y agoYou should watch his videos. They shed quite a bit of light on SerenityOS is written, and it's given me a lot of insight on OSes work.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dovyski 5y ago
- clone1018 5y agoI don't have anything profound to say, but I love alternative OSes like SerenityOS, and I wish the world had more of them.
- selfhoster11 5y agoThe one I usually recommend for people to check out is Haiku OS. I see diversity as a positive, and hope that all these OSes succeed at their goals.
- akling 5y agoThe more the merrier! And I would love to see more alternative browser engines as well :^)
- burky 5y agoI'm just as interested in his journey that brought him here as I am with this OS. So amazing!
- nesarkvechnep 5y agoDamn, the GUI brought back sweet memories. The OS as a whole looks nice too.
- squarefoot 5y agoYes, and it's a very functional GUI: well thought, informative, rational, with every section put where it belongs. It comes from an era in which GUIs were made to solve problems. I hope it will never ever ever go the path that GTK took after version 2.
- prohobo 5y agoI've been thinking recently that Windows 95/98/2000 had better UX than you can find nowadays on most websites, and while not "beautiful", it was still aesthetic. That + a good console? Great idea. I'd love to see some innovation with the old school design ethos too; maybe there are even better ways of displaying controls? Or maybe a new way to think about controls that weren't around back then.
- gfody 5y agoI think that era of Windows stuck to the literature and best practices, the UI spoke to us in its own visual language and let us know what could be clicked or right-clicked or that it had focus and might do something if you hit the spacebar etc. etc. things that behave similarly look alike, all the clues you need to learn some software on your own were there, the visual language was teaching us how we're meant to use it, the more familiar we were with windows software the quicker we could pickup new windows software. and then I don't know what happened Steven Sinofsky showed up with radical ideas that software should be beautiful and everything sort of went to hell? curious if there was actually some kind of event marking the beginning of the end of intuitive software design for MS
- nmstoker 5y agoMac also caved after a real highpoint of good definition in the 90s. With MS, they just seemed to stop paying attention to their own guidance and much preferred doing their own thing (see most editions of Office!), people just got fed up and it seems like it crumbled from there.
- bluedino 5y agoI think that Windows 2000 and Max OS were the pinnacle of clean Interfaces. It seems like once the graphics capabilities became common, OS interface developers used them even when they shouldn't have. Remember when moving windows in Linux had a "jiggle" to them? The genie effect in OS X? What about the "cube" of multiple desktop? I still don't know what the point of transparent windows is. A few effects are useful - like aero peek in Windows.
- dang 5y agoThese look like the past threads so far. Others? SerenityOS: A love letter to '90s user interfaces with a Unix-like core - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23911180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23911180 - July 2020 (1 comment) Introduction to SerenityOS Programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22479132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22479132 - March 2020 (43 comments) Pledge() and Unveil() in SerenityOS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22116914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22116914 - Jan 2020 (28 comments) CTF writeup: First published SerenityOS kernel exploit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21918351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21918351 - Dec 2019 (2 comments) SerenityOS: From Zero to HTML in a Year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21212294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21212294 - Oct 2019 (52 comments) Serenity OS update (August 2019) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20851356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20851356 - Sept 2019 (2 comments) SerenityOS – a graphical Unix-like OS for x86, with 90s aesthetics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19986126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19986126 - May 2019 (179 comments) Serenity: x86 Unix-like operating system for IBM PC-compatibles - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19537807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19537807 - March 2019 (83 comments)
- progbits 5y agoNot a HN thread but he posts monthly project updates very similar to this demo but often longer and more in-depth. If you liked this post you will definitely enjoy these too: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMOpZvQB55bfp6ykOLayLqLrjcpv_Sw3P https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMOpZvQB55bfp6ykOLayL...
- usaphp 5y agoI love Andreas’s YouTube channel, such a nice and relaxing stream of quality programming
- dmitrygr 5y agoOw, that hit me right in the feels! That wonderful UI. That wonderful amazing UI! No light grey on dark grey text, no borderless buttons, no pointless 45% width margins.
- throwaway47292 5y agoand scrollbars that don't disappear when you try to use them!
- bdash 5y agoAwesome to see that you're doing well, Andreas!
- akling 5y agoHi bdash! Great to see you here, and I hope life is going well for you too :)
- InTheArena 5y agoI'd honestly love to see this with some modern workloads and practices. This guy seems like a total savant - there is something to be said for creating a whole system instead of layers.
- sonofhans 5y agoWow, that's impressive work. Kudos to Andreas for building a community as well as a tool I'm equally amazed and horrified that they're building a web browser. It seems easier to build the native OS.
- wheelerof4te 5y agoI've been following Andreas on Youtube for quite some time. It is a monumental undertaking to write a completely new OS from scratch, and I admire his perserverence so far. He has managed to make a worthy tribute to both UNIX and old Windows aesthetic style. And he did it almost all alone. Of course, Serenity OS is now a living, breathing community, just as it should be. BTW, the guy has even ported DOOM, old DukeNukem and freakin' Diablo 1 to his OS. Mad respect to Andreas, Serenity is truly a work of genius.
- JasonCannon 5y agoI especially like how he did this all after getting out of rehab trying to spend his time on something productive. Mad respect.
- Kranar 5y agoThe list of people speaking at Handmade Seattle as well as the topics sounds absolutely fantastic. So many conferences are either too corporate with presentations that are mostly flashy marketing, or they are technical but there's only like 2 or 3 people giving a genuinely solid talk. This conference looks like it has everything, great speakers and great topics.
- akling 5y agoAgreed, the Handmade Seattle event was fantastic! They have started posting recordings of this year's event to the website, so you'll be able to watch all the talks there soon (AFAIK) :)
- eggy 5y agoWow! I love the mashup of unix/linux command line functionality with functional gui. I had been looking at Mezzano, because I prefer Lisp, but then I thought it would be great to implement a Lisp on SerenityOS with all native tie-ins to the gui and OS. Hmmm... So inspiring!
- losvedir 5y agoHoly moly this is incredible! I'm not usually one to watch videos here, but this one was worth it (and pretty short). I'm amazed that he built a whole new browser to go with his OS.
- akling 5y agoGlad you enjoyed the video! Just to be clear, while I started the project, it's since been hacked on by hundreds of people (we're well over 500 contributors on GitHub) and it's by no means a solo project anymore! https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity
- martin1975 5y agoI've seen his videos a few times via HN - how close is the OS to being able to use GCC or CLANG and say, compile all Debian packages.... which is one of the largest repos. I mean for this to really be usable it would have to be able to work well w/existing millions of lines of C/C++ code...
- akling 5y agoWe have a growing number of ports for those that wish to run 3rd party software on SerenityOS: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Ports https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Ports Note that the system aims to be completely free from dependencies, so all ports are strictly optional.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- johnwheeler 5y agoI don't understand how they write an OS kernel, command shell, graphical shell, and browser in 3 years? I get there are more than a single person involved but it still seems very rapid. What are the catches? Is it still very immature or assuming there was enough user-land software (which I'm sure there is not), is this ready for production use?
- tuckerpo 5y agoAndreas just gets stuff done. Watch his live content sometime.
- johnwheeler 5y agoUnacceptable. If this is so, I quit.
- joeberon 5y agoHe has a strong philosophy of "if you want it, do it". Coming into the Serenity community and asking for features to be implemented for you is a taboo. He believes that all computing tasks can be done given enough dedication. This project is basically proof of that. Keep in mind though that he was a WebKit developer at Apple for many years working with full stack control of iOS from kernel to browser.
- alpanka 5y agoThat's the part I find most impressing. "Today we are going to add X" 2 hours later: X is added and working fine. Meanwhile, at work I could easily spend 2 hours looking for a GCC flag or figure out why the build script fails on arch after latest update
- jerrre 5y agoAt the risk of being nitpicky: Updating tools in your environment/workflow is exactly a thing that can lose a lot of time, often for not much gain[1]. One way to become very productive is to know your tools very well, and that would extend to not changing them often. [1] not much gain in productivity, but perhaps in security, compatibility, etc
- emptyparadise 5y agoAn operating system for a better world...
- tester756 5y agoDumping data to json seems to be incredibly handy! Thank you for your effort folks
- marcodiego 5y agoSerenityOS is interesting. Hope it doesn't get the same end as SkyOS.
- karteum 5y agoSerenityOS is licenced under BSD-2-Clause License while SkyOS was entirely proprietary (and therefore disappeared when its development stalled), so the comparison seems irrelevant (your point would be more relevant if you were mentioning Syllable instead, which was quited advanced and open-source, yet somewhat seems to have disappeared... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllable_Desktop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllable_Desktop . But since source-code is available anyone could restart it :) I also hope that SerenityOS has a long and successful lifespan, as it seems promising !)
- marcodiego 5y agoAFAIR SkyOS started as open source. But considering current direction, I really don't think there is any risk of the same happening to SerenityOS.
- aledalgrande 5y agodid he just right click on a terminal file to open it （°0°）
- makeworld 5y agoI paused the video and gasped at this, I had to go back and watch it again. It's the little things :)
- aumerle 5y agoTrivial to do in many modern terminal emulators, the most flexible approach being in kitty, where you can map clicks on filenames printed by ls to arbitrary actions: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/open_actions/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/open_actions/
- bpye 5y agoI saw this. Does any other terminal emulator do this?
- aumerle 5y agoSure, many can, for example: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/open_actions/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/open_actions/
- winrid 5y agoThis blew me away. Seeing that was a huge surprise. I see a great future for this project. Iterm2 does something similar with links, but not files printed from something like ls. We should fix that. :)
- sergiotapia 5y agoThis looks like a monumental effort from the dev. Is it really all 100% original code he wrote? GUI, browser, terminal, js interpreter, everything from scratch?! Reminds me of Terry Davis' - one of the few programmers I believe is "genius level" in the world.
- asddubs 5y agoIt is all original code, but he didn't write all of it, there are lots of contributors at this point
- m0zg 5y agoThe CPU emulator looked like Valgrind judging by the output. So you'd have to stretch the definition of "original code" to the max for it to hold up.
- Kiro 5y agoNo, it's from scratch but inspired by Valgrind.
- wheelerof4te 5y agoYou can see him program it from scratch on Youtube. He specificaly mentioned Valgrind as an inspiration.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- beebeepka 5y agoTruly monumental. What hardware do I need? Also, gaming needs to be a thing. What would it take to have say Quake 3 run on your OS?
- Kiro 5y agohttps://youtu.be/-rMY7Fv84eA https://youtu.be/-rMY7Fv84eA
- wheelerof4te 5y agoNot Andreas, but he was able to port some older games to Serenity. Games like DOOM, original Quake, DukeNukem and Diablo 1. You should be able to compile some NES emulators yourself. The OS itself runs in custom VM, but Andreas did manage to run it on his PC.
- anthk 5y agoSDL/SDL2 and games/emulators/interpreters like Scummvm/Frotz/Mednafen should give Serenity OS a huge array of games.
- Retr0id 5y agoOne thing that regularly bothers me about Linux, is how janky it is to parse fields out of the procfs. Using JSON makes so much more sense!
- sneak 5y agoYou could make a fuse file system that reads /proc and provides /procjson Alternately you could make a kernel module that provides /proc/js/ or /proc/whatever.json alongside /proc/whatever.
- phendrenad2 5y agoOr you could write a library that parses /proc into JSON, and everyone could include it if they want it.
- busymom0 5y agoDoes this need a specific hardware to run? Is it possible to port this to mobile?
- sdwvit 5y agoThat is the cool demo Andreas worked for some time recently!
- tayloredu 5y agothedailyhustle
- grae_QED 5y agoThanks for sharing your project! The passion you put into It definitely shows! Serenity OS looks amazing, and your projects paradigm's align with some of my own for general purpose software. If I wasn't so locked into my own software ecosystem, and I had time to dabble with a new OS, I would absolutely try yours out. For the time being, I'll subscribe to your YouTube channel.
- phendrenad2 5y agoAnyone know what the driver story is with SerenityOS? Is it a standard Unix/Linux thing, where drivers have to be compiled against an unstable ABI/API? Or is it more like Windows where drivers are forward/backward compatible?
- haspok 5y agoAs far as I can tell, there are no drivers - this OS runs on QEMU only. I guess if you are lucky, you can get it to boot on a real system accidentally. This is the opposite of Haiku-OS, for example, which tries to provide at least the minimal amount of drivers, and some people are using it on real hardware. It was actually a really interesting decision, to concentrate all efforts on the fun parts of OS development, and completely ignore the 80% which is boring, frustrating, and requires a large continuous investment to stay up to date with the latest stuff. Looking at Haiku, they have been working on their OS for decades now, and still aren't in a generally usable form. I'm not sure what a QEMU-only OS is actually good for, other than playing around with it, but maybe I'm not the target audience :)
- bitigchi 5y agoHaiku is actually quite usable on a wide variety of hardware (I use it myself on bare metal), it only needs a browser port such as Firefox. Falkon has been ported as of yesterday, but still might need fixes and stuff. In case the the graphics drivers are not supported, VESA and/or Framebuffer drivers come to aid, and provide a usable system.
- pjmlp 5y agoIt is good enough to run on top of type 1 hypervisors like Hyper-V and Xen, like all those systems powering all cloud flavours out there.
- Dessesaf 5y agoI don't see a problem with a QEMU-only OS. Serenity is explicity designed for personal use. It's not a headless OS in any way. I could see it being useful in a corporate environment where it's useful to have a windows host for business reasons, and you run your unix-like system in a hypervisor for development. That's how I work, and I think quite a few people work like this. Serenity is perfect for this. And obviously, nothing prevents people from writing drivers eventually. Andreas probably wants to run Serenity on whatever his hardware is eventually. But there's little point in doing that till we actually have a mature system that anyone would want to run daily.
- throwawaysea 5y agoIf I understand correctly, this one person and a small team of volunteers (?) built not only the core operating system from scratch but also the user interface and also apps like the browser? How is that possible? I would think this type of thing needs hundreds of engineers.
- mythz 5y agoThere's lots of other things like its Hack Studio IDE [1], GML GUI Markup language and GML Playground [2], an x86 User Space Emulator [3]. I highly recommend checking out his YouTube channel [4] where he records doing a lot of this stuff in real-time. Also pretty amazing that most of this was done on the side after this full-time job, up until a few months ago where he's been able to quit to focus full-time on SerenityOS from GitHub Sponsorships [5]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRGu8DVrlHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRGu8DVrlHQ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QYBvTy9QKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QYBvTy9QKE [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYWMLiZKB-Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYWMLiZKB-Y [4] https://www.youtube.com/c/AndreasKling/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/AndreasKling/videos [5] https://github.com/sponsors/awesomekling https://github.com/sponsors/awesomekling
- daitangio 5y agoI have downloaded Serenity and played a bit with it after HN link to Ars Technica article. Very nice, well written and compact: it runs with only 128 MB of RAM (!) and it is very very fast. Also mailing list very kindly, I asked some simple questions and answer was polite and wellcome. If you are studying operating system at your university course, it is worth a try!
- alanwreath 5y agoPfffft I got browser tabs that use less than that /s
- mynameismon 5y agoIs it just me or do some people find the grey theme (yielding the nostalgic UI) off-putting?
- Narishma 5y agoI find it beautiful.
- abnercoimbre 5y agoHey everyone! I'm the organizer for Handmade Seattle. It was a pleasure hosting SerenityOS, as Andreas is an inspiration to us. If I may plug, note we are 100% indie and upload presentations for free. We have a newsletter [0] but since HN loves RSS we have that setup as well [1]. [0] https://media.handmade-seattle.com/subscribe https://media.handmade-seattle.com/subscribe [1] https://media.handmade-seattle.com/rss https://media.handmade-seattle.com/rss
- jbverschoor 5y agoThis seems more sane than any other thing out there
- qwerty456127 5y agoThis is the most brilliant software project ever and this man is a genius messiah.
- _daver 5y agoThis is a really cool project and I want to see it succeed. I realize the FAQ states "There is no plan". That aside, are there any longer-term goals for the project or things they want to support in the future?
- meltedcapacitor 5y agoHas SerenityOS got a setting for the location of the "light" source? Back in the days there was no good explanation for users who asked how to change that. Windows95 and clones were all hardcoded with a top left light source producing the buttons' shadows!
- qwerty456127 5y agoPlease add an "always on top" button to the window decorations alongside maximize/minimize/close. I want it badly and feel very frustrated because it only exists in KDE. I want it in all the non-tiling window environments I use including XFCE, Windows, Mac and Serenity.
- nightowl_games 5y agoI'm not a kernel developer and know very little about OSes. I watched this video thinking I woulnt get it and would find it boring. Within 2 minutes my mind is blown. Amazing Job.