Not-a-Linux distro review: SerenityOS is a Unix-y love letter to the ’90s

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  If this desktop doesn't look hauntingly familiar to you, you either didn't live through the 1990s-or perhaps just didn't live through them right. [credit: Jim Salter ]

Today, I test-drove an in-development operating system project that seems almost disturbingly tailored to me specifically: SerenityOS. I cannot possibly introduce SerenityOS more accurately than its own website does:

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.

Every word of this introduction is almost surgically accurate. To someone in SerenityOS's target demographic-someone like myself (and likely many Arsians), who grew up with NT4 systems but matured on modern Linux and BSD-SerenityOS hits like a love letter from the ex you never quite forgot.

SerenityOS isn't Linux-and it's not BSD, either

What that brief intro doesn't get across is the scale of the project. You might think that SerenityOS is just a Linux distro with an unusually ambitious vaporwave aesthetic, but it's actually an entire operating system built from the ground up. That means custom-built kernel, display manager, shell... everything.

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