SerenityOS


SerenityOS is a Unix-like free and open source operating system created by Andreas Kling. Its design draws inspiration from the graphical user interface of the 1990s. As a relatively new operating system, rapid progress is being made in its development. Some of its features currently include an integrated development environment, a visual debugger, a web browser with a JavaScript engine, and graphically oriented desktop shell.

History

SerenityOS was started at the end of 2018 by Andreas Kling a Swedish software engineer formerly at Apple working on WebKit and the Safari web browser. Kling began writing SerenityOS in his spare time while recording his development sessions using screen capture software. He would later start posting those sessions to YouTube. By mid 2019, a GitHub repository was created to facilitate community development of the project. Many people from around the world have joined to contribute to the project. It currently receives major additions from the open source development community every week. Kling has stated that he is surprised by all the development contributions and is constantly reviewing and publishing the work from other contributors.

Features

SerenityOS is designed to be a simple Unix-like operating system inspired by the user interfaces common among desktop computers in the 1990s. Although it is currently being designed as a virtual machine image, it has features such as a 32-bit kernel with preemptive multitasking, an IPv4 networking stack, ext2 file system, a graphical toolkit, and a compositing window manager. Many new features are being added rapidly and Kling has the goal of eventually making SerenityOS run outside of a virtual machine environment.