I'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.<p>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.
Very excited to watch.<p>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!<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/AndreasKling" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/c/AndreasKling</a>
Hey everyone! I'm the organizer for Handmade Seattle. It was a pleasure hosting SerenityOS, as Andreas is an inspiration to us.<p>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].<p>[0] <a href="https://media.handmade-seattle.com/subscribe" rel="nofollow">https://media.handmade-seattle.com/subscribe</a><p>[1] <a href="https://media.handmade-seattle.com/rss" rel="nofollow">https://media.handmade-seattle.com/rss</a>
The 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.
I 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.<p>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?
These look like the past threads so far. Others?<p><i>SerenityOS: A love letter to '90s user interfaces with a Unix-like core</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23911180" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23911180</a> - July 2020 (1 comment)<p><i>Introduction to SerenityOS Programming</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22479132" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22479132</a> - March 2020 (43 comments)<p><i>Pledge() and Unveil() in SerenityOS</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22116914" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22116914</a> - Jan 2020 (28 comments)<p><i>CTF writeup: First published SerenityOS kernel exploit</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21918351" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21918351</a> - Dec 2019 (2 comments)<p><i>SerenityOS: From Zero to HTML in a Year</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21212294" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21212294</a> - Oct 2019 (52 comments)<p><i>Serenity OS update (August 2019) [video]</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20851356" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20851356</a> - Sept 2019 (2 comments)<p><i>SerenityOS – a graphical Unix-like OS for x86, with 90s aesthetics</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19986126" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19986126</a> - May 2019 (179 comments)<p><i>Serenity: x86 Unix-like operating system for IBM PC-compatibles</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19537807" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19537807</a> - March 2019 (83 comments)
Wow, that's impressive work. Kudos to Andreas for building a community as well as a tool<p>I'm equally amazed and horrified that they're building a web browser. It seems easier to build the native OS.
I'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.
Ow, that hit me right in the feels! That wonderful UI. That wonderful amazing UI!<p>No light grey on dark grey text, no borderless buttons, no pointless 45% width margins.
I'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...
Holy moly this is incredible! I'm not usually one to watch videos here, but this one was worth it (and pretty short).<p>I'm amazed that he built a whole new browser to go with his OS.
I'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.<p>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.<p>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.
Anyone 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?
If 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.
I 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.<p>His hacking sessions on youtube are also great.
Thanks 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.<p>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.
I 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.<p>Also mailing list very kindly, I asked some simple questions and answer was polite and wellcome.<p>If you are studying operating system at your university course, it is worth a try!
Please 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.
Wow! 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!
Has SerenityOS got a setting for the location of the "light" source?<p>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!
This 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?
I'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.
Very 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 ?
This 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?!<p>Reminds me of Terry Davis' - one of the few programmers I believe is "genius level" in the world.
A 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.