A graphical Unix-like operating system for desktop computers!
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.
Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic of late-1990s productivity software and the power-user accessibility of late-2000s *nix.
This is a system by us, for us, based on th
12 Comments
raxxorraxor
Peak usability in my opinion. Space efficient and simple.
Not my favorite design and color scheme, but certainly better than what modern Windows looks like.
That has no direction and doesn't even look modern. And the line of text with "Windows Update is committed to helping reduce carbon emissions" is as superfluous as many other controls as well. I mean nice for MS, but it really doesn't belong there.
agos
it's basically windows 95, there does not seem to be other influences?
dailykoder
The UI in terms of space and usability looks great. Two "modern" things I don't want to miss: Good font rendering and a fast application launcher (mod -> type a few characters -> enter). What I dislike the most on modern UI, and maybe absolutely hate, are all those super slow animations. Just gimme the damn thing, I don't need those animations. (Yes I know on most plattforms I can disable them, but this often takes quite a few steps)
breadwinner
Win95 UI is a cheap copy of NeXTSTEP. The original is so much nicer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_…
poisonborz
A "love letter" would be incorporating the best of those ideas and create a modern interpretation with improvements like vector scaling.
This is just copying.
pakyr
How's this project doing after it lost its founder and biggest contributor (Andreas Kling)? I see the commit history is still reasonably active, so it's not dead at least . . .
INTPenis
They only show the good part of 90s UIs, the standardized part. They don't show the part where every installer wanted to look unique, weird ICQ clients.
averageRoyalty
This is a very cool art project.
Is there a practical daily driver Linux that has this feel and vibe? Can I do this cleanly with GNOME/Debian or XFCE/Manjaro, or a bespoke OS with an underlying package manager?
jklinger410
Would be cool if they could spin this out into a DE for other distros.
bee_rider
Oh wow, that looks a whole lot like windows 98, haha.
How’s SerenityOS feel as a daily driver at this point? Would it be much harder to use than, say, Linux 15 years ago?
andrea76
The former maintainer published a video summary every month on YouTube about SerenityOS progress. And now it seems that anyone does it
guerrilla
It's honestly just straight up relaxing to look at, same with BeOS/Haiku. I need to escape GNOME and get a real UI like that.