Graphical Unix-like operating system for x86 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 the things we like.
It's generally aimed at being run on QEMU. But it can be installed on bare metal at your own risk. This [1] mentions:
> Current hardware support is extremely limited. [...] x86 [...] Most successful hard disk installations have been on Pentium 4 era hardware [...] 2 GB parallel ATA or SATA IDE disk [...] no support for USB but some machines will emulate PS/2 keyboards and mice in the BIOS via USB [...] having real PS/2 input devices is recommended [...] A minimum of 128 MB RAM and a Pentium III class CPU [...] No GPU suport [...] VESA BIOS [...] No wifi [...] only three network card chipset [...] The sole sound card supported is the SoundBlaster 16 ISA
The HW compatibility list [2] is pretty short also.
It runs pretty well on a Pentium 4. I wrote the Starfield screensaver for Serenity (poorly) and it pegs the P4, for what it's worth. It's runs great in QEMU on any modern CPU.
I've netbooted it on my ASUS A7N8X Deluxe motherboard with an Athlon XP processor and 1 GiB of RAM (~2003 era). I haven't tried older museum pieces, but the unofficial CPU requirement is a Pentium III-class CPU or better.
Graphical Unix-like operating system for x86 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 the things we like.
[1] https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity