Serenity Now

August 20, 2021 11:56 PM

Not-a-Linux distro review: SerenityOS is a Unix-y love letter to the '90s - "On the minus side, SerenityOS's browser threw an exception—on the plus side, that Crash Reporter is a thing of beauty!"

SerenityOS's homegrown browser will need some more work, also—it can't successfully play YouTube videos yet... Porting a modern browser like Firefox or Chromium to an entirely new operating system is arguably as difficult as writing one from scratch, and it's a never-ending project given the rapidity with which web standards and browser technologies evolve.

Fortunately, this isn't Kling's first browser rodeo—he told us that he worked on web browsers for Nokia and others for many years. He also has the advantage of being able to build a web browser that's only a web browser, something that isn't always possible with older operating systems.

also btw...

• I feel like it's the 1990s all over again: "I'm playing with a new browser, Sidekick, and I kinda like it. Anyone have a new Gopher client I can try out? I want the full period frisson."
• Larry David Confronts Alan Dershowitz in Heated Encounter at Martha's Vineyard Grocery Store - "In which David confronted Dershowitz..."

Dershowitz told David, “We can still talk, Larry.”

David replied, “No. No. We really can’t. I saw you. I saw you with your arm around [former Trump Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo! It’s disgusting!”

Dershowitz said, “He’s my former student [at Harvard Law]. I greet all of my former students that way. I can’t greet my former students?”

To which David replied, “It’s disgusting. Your whole enclave — it’s disgusting. You’re disgusting!”

• A quick thread of how we're going back to the 1990s. "Now I just want grunge back, dammit."[*]
• Mindwalk - "We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results."

posted by kliuless (16 comments total)

it's only 1990s in the worst ways, like, having no meaningful security mechanisms, which, back in the day, happened to overlap with open source. this was a problem, not a feature.

linux didn't eat the world just because it was good, but rather because other unix-like systems, lacking the broad multi-vendor consortium that contributed to linux, could not remain on par with the state of the art

this thing is a sad cosplay of 1990s unix, without any of the sophistication of that era. back in 1993, when linux was fresh and new, commerial unix already had sophisticated mandatory access control -- but the serenityos cosplay isn't gonna cover Trusted Solaris or Trusted IRIX

it is just a costume

linux started out that bad, but, well, it got better.
posted by your postings may, in fact, be signed at 12:06 AM on August 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

linux started out that bad, but, well, it got better.

did it?

posted from 5.7.8-050708-generic
posted by loquacious at 12:50 AM on August 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

it's only 1990s in the worst ways, like, having no meaningful security mechanisms, which, back in the day, happened to overlap with open source. this was a problem, not a feature.

In the 1990s, desktop GUI-driven UNIX was something I only encountered a couple times when visiting computer labs. It was weird world that sort of looked like the Windows 95 and MacOS interfaces I was familiar with, but at the same time it was wildly different. When I got around to trying out RedHat Linux in 1998 with fvwm it really felt as though I had landed on a new and dangerous planet with only a collection of cryptic usenet posts to guide me.

It was terrifying but it was also exhilarating to successfully get XFree86's configuration just right for my monitor and graphics card, and I wonder if that's the experience SerenityOS is trying to recreate.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:02 AM on August 21, 2021 [3 favorites]

Kling is a recovering addict, and he decided to build an operating system as a long-term project to focus his mind and occupy his time, similar to the way someone else might decide to build a car or house.

This reminds me of the ultramarathoner who said they got into running multiple ultramarathons in a row as a way to conquer their addictions. I remember thinking that they had just traded one set of addictions for a different - presumably healthier? - set. I'm thinking something similar about the millions of lines of code that Kling has written for this project.

It's a good thing that he's only writing it for himself, because the name dooms its chance of wider adoption.
posted by clawsoon at 5:12 AM on August 21, 2021

This is neat! And impressive. It's on my list of things to try - at least in a virtual machine. (The UI looks like it contains nearly everything I work hard to eliminate the moment I install any OS. But, to each their own. And if it should be adopted by more people, we might get other versions of whatever a window manager is called in this case.) Very cool.
posted by eotvos at 5:43 AM on August 21, 2021

Nothing usable can stay pure. Every OS seems like a fool's errand at some point in development. Most prove themselves to be. My memory of 90's OSes were my CS-major friends hating Windows 3.0 and being really excited about OS/2. Nostalgia seems like a bad hook to build an OS on, but on the other hand, as a casual user there's a lot of software I've used that had a peak of usablity and then future updates stripped out good features and replaced them with garbage.
posted by rikschell at 5:46 AM on August 21, 2021 [3 favorites]

Besides the browser, the other major challange will be getting it out of qemu and onto real hardware. The linux kernel is 7 mb, plus 290 mb of modules, mostly drivers for all the hardware out there. That's a massive mountain to climb.
posted by joeyh at 6:43 AM on August 21, 2021 [3 favorites]

I think people are being pretty harsh here on someone's cool little hobby project. Nobody is suggesting that you replace your Trusted Solaris with this. or that you should roll it out to a thousand corporate desktops. As far as I can tell, the author doesn't care if it "takes off" - this is an art project made as a tribute to a particular time and aesthetic in computing. Not everything is about you, not everything is about money.
posted by jordemort at 6:53 AM on August 21, 2021 [25 favorites]

Not sure if this is going to go anywhere but perhaps that's not the point. I think it has an interesting choice of ideas to recycle and recombine. I certainly understand the appeal, also on a psychological level. Computer lore is rife with quips and stories alluding to the all-consuming state of (blissful?) flow that programming can induce, from "guru meditation", to "Mel the Programmer", to "code ninja", to my favorite, "coding is like cocaine: misery, misery, misery, euphoria."

Is it useful? Is it healthy? Valid questions. But if someone makes a quilt, I don't ask what that portends for the quilt market. And people don't stop climbing mountains just because someone else already did it (better). Sometimes what's you're building is yourself, and in this case the guy also built a small community. That's pretty great.
posted by dmh at 7:56 AM on August 21, 2021 [7 favorites]

TempleOS is a strange thing to compare any other OS to. It's a text-based OS that one man programmed because God told him to. It's literally Plan9…from Outer Space. [Plan9 is another text-based OS…that's the joke.]

Hobby OSes can be fascinating and exquisite realizations of concepts and theories that otherwise would not get fully explored. They're the avant-garde of operating systems, and operating systems are something almost all of us use every day (even if we're not conscious of it).

In my VirtualBox, I keep a strange menagerie of OSes, which I fire up occasionally just to broaden my computing horizons: Plan9, Oberon, BlueBottle, Looking Glass Solaris, Icarus, SyllableOS, KolibriOS, TempleOS, MenuetOS. Used to have many dozens of Linuxes as well, but now I've settled on Xubuntu.
posted by jabah at 8:03 AM on August 21, 2021 [5 favorites]

In terms of UI, I can't say I like it, but in terms of "cool another hobby OS" much kudos.

While it's not "hobbyist" by nature, I am very curious about things like Oberon/BlueBottle/A2 and the various Plan9 projects.

I always like seeing where people go with things that aren't just more Linux/BSD or Windows wannabes. (OK, this is a bit ... uh... windows-y) - but you know, at the core.

Curious how different this is from these other systems. Interesting mentioning Haiku/BeOS, considering they're like - based on SMP, and this is kinda the opposite of that (even if they are looking to add it).

So it doesn't stand alone at all? Just runs in a VM?
posted by symbioid at 10:19 AM on August 21, 2021 [3 favorites]

It's a good thing that he's only writing it for himself, because the name dooms its chance of wider adoption.

Well, as you can see from the first comment, even if you do something as a project for yourself and write something that's quite frankly beyond what most developers could create more or less by themselves, people will still be dying to shit on it publicly.
posted by Candleman at 11:33 AM on August 21, 2021 [7 favorites]

I think we pine for the '90s because it was a time when there was hope after the ending of the cold war and before the war on terror started as another Western crusade.

The '90s was a relatively awful time in my life. High school fucking sucked and I hated almost everyone but I still pine for that feeling of things feeling like they were always getting better.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 12:09 PM on August 21, 2021 [13 favorites]

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!"
posted by clew at 12:35 PM on August 21, 2021

The '90s was a relatively awful time in my life. High school fucking sucked and I hated almost everyone

See, I was okay with the 90's because I dropped out of high school at the beginning of the decade.
posted by fnerg at 1:10 PM on August 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

neat, but single-thread was also so very 90s.

Another deeply weird retro OS for those who like that kind of thing is RISC OS. It only runs on ARM, and needs some help to run on modern ARM like a Raspberry Pi. It's blazingly fast, since it's almost all written in assembly language and uses cooperative multitasking. It's one of the few still-in-development OSs to use cooperative multitasking, so you always get 100% of the CPU, but have to remember to be nice and say when you're done.
posted by scruss at 2:53 PM on August 21, 2021 [2 favorites]