Serenity OS

Serenity OS

Serenity OS is an open source operating system written from scratch. It has a focus on simplicity, elegance, and usability. It features a graphical user interface, web browser, productivity tools, games, and basic Unix command line utilities.
Serenity OS image
opensource unixlike microkernel graphical-user-interface

Serenity OS: Lightweight Open Source Operating System

A simple, elegant, and user-friendly open source operating system with a graphical interface, web browser, productivity tools, games, and Unix command line utilities.

What is Serenity OS?

Serenity OS is an open source operating system written from scratch with a focus on simplicity, elegance, and usability. It was started as a hobby project by Andreas Kling in 2017 and has since grown into a usable system with an enthusiastic community around it.

Some key features of Serenity OS include:

  • Graphical user interface with windows, menus, title bars, etc. Similar in appearance to older operating systems like Windows 95 or Mac OS.
  • Pixel and widget-based graphics libraries for building applications.
  • Web browser called Links with support for HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc.
  • Productivity applications like a vector graphics editor, paint program, terminal emulator, basic text editor.
  • Games like Snake, Minesweeper, Chess.
  • Unix-like command line shell and basic Unix utilities like ls, cat, grep, etc.

The main advantages of Serenity OS are its simplicity, clean design, speed, and hackability. Since everything is open source and written in C++, developers can easily dive into the code. It's a great operating system for tinkering, learning operating system development concepts, or trying something different from mainstream options.

While more limited compared to full-featured desktop operating systems, Serenity OS has nevertheless attained a usable state with active development. The responsive community and accessibility of the code makes it an interesting open source project to follow or potentially contribute to.

Serenity OS Features

Features

  1. Graphical user interface
  2. Web browser
  3. Productivity tools
  4. Games
  5. Basic Unix command line utilities

Pricing

  • Open Source

Pros

Open source

Written from scratch

Focus on simplicity, elegance and usability

Cons

Limited hardware and application support compared to mainstream operating systems


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