Haiku and SerenityOS

I’m amazed by progress in free OSs (which still gives me some faith in human beings) with special attraction for those targeting lean a ligthweith design, instead of tons of eye candy.
This is why it is now several years I’m following development of haiku but also reactos, and recently I also stumbled into serenityOS, which received a noticeable amount of care and attention in just a bunch of years.
While I don’t agree with their strategy “let’s re-write everything in-house”, I just appreciate the target of an “essential” OS, with look & feel from the nineties.
I’m not much into development of OS, so in your opinion where are the similarities and differences between haiku and serenity?
Are there any fields where the two projects could eventually co-operate in future?

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Major difference is that you can download & install Haiku, whilst you will have to download & compile everything for Serenity…no contest! :wink:

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That was the case for Haiku for a very long time until someone started providing semi-unofficial nightly builds, and then there was a first alpha release a year or so later.

Maybe the time will come when Serenity will try to be a more “serious” project, or maybe it will remain as a place for developers to have fun without any users to worry about. Maybe the project name is a hint about that.

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Isn’t serenity becoming a sinking ship, with loss of its creator and selling feature (ladybird), I don’t see a way that it keeps getting updated and maintained.

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The weeks after the fork,I saw decreased activity in the SerenityOS project and also feared that it may slow down now,but looking at the current activity level,I think the project is still healthy and has lots of contributions.
See here: Commits · SerenityOS/serenity · GitHub
They are,in fact,backporting a lot of changes from the forked Ladybird now.
But I think that makes sense,anything else would be duplicated efforts when it comes to the web libraries.

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This line from their FAQ makes me suspect it will be the latter

Where are the ISO images?
There are no ISO images. This project does not cater to non-technical users.

Relations between Haiku devs and Haiku users have had their ups and downs over the years. But I’ve never seen anything like that.

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Yes, but it seems to be (from a distance, not following the project closely) that there aren’t really users at this point, and that the value of the project is more in the development live streams, and maybe the comfort/nostalgia that such a project exist, even if you wouldn’t use it.

So, nothing wrong with it in that situation. It is not an OS meant to be used.

Outside of this context, the wording would sound very elitist to me.

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I’ve come to see Serenity as a “tech demo” OS. It is an OS for developers, by developers but not one they really plan to use themselves, just endlessly tweak and update for the fun of writing a fantasy OS that would be perfect for developers who like the 90s computing aesthetic.

I must admit I was one of the man people trying to talk Kling out of starting work on Ladybird because I knew what a massive task it was writing a browser from scratch. Serenity has taken a back seat as AK is almost exclusively focused on Ladybird now and he has been for the last couple of years at least.

I was wrong to try to make him focus on Serenity. Ladybird is more interesting and important.

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SerenityOS is a lightweight OS with a Windows 9x look and feel, so its selling points are similar to Haiku. As much as I am looking forward to Ladybird becoming ready for everyday use, I definitely would not call Ladybird the SerenityOS selling feature.

Serenity is made by the devs for the devs, it is actually very easy to compile and run in a vm.
They dont care much about real hardware right now, or endusers, which is fine.
It is more of a fun project than a daily driver os, which might change some day in the future.
I wish them good luck and lots of fun, unfortunatly i cannot code more than hello world, but that i can in almost a dozen languages :wink:

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I don’t think that any amount of comparison does either project justice. Neither is superior to the other. They just have different goals.

Haiku wants to deliver an accessible personal computing operating system that is usable for the average person, and it doesn’t shy away from integrating third-party software, ports and non-retro-designed elements in order to attain maximum usability and compatibility. It’s aimed at people who want a computer to just work, just with a BeOS touch.

SerenityOS is not meant to cater to the general public and it doesn’t aim to appeal or cater to a userbase; it deliberately sacrifices usability and compatibility for its vision of a completely bonsai-garden-ish system where everything is handmade for it to evoke a certain emotion in the user. It’s aimed at people who admire technology and aren’t afraid to cherish their system.

I kind of admire it, albeit from a distance. Sometimes I feel sad and miffed about how much third-party, non-native software and ports are on Haiku, compared to programs made from scratch for Haiku trying to play up to its strengths, and that’s where I miss SerenityOS. I don’t want the community to settle for ports of KDE or Gnome programs with all their bloat and non-Haiku-ish design, if we could also develop our own replacements.

All things considered though, I appreciate how easy Haiku is to set up and how functional it is on bare metal - a VM just wouldn’t satisfy me.

My ideal OS would be a combination of the two - a usable, accessible retro-styled opinionated system that isn’t afraid of doing things differently from the Big Three OSs, but with an entirely native software suite and without any ports.

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[cough] RiscOS [/cough] .

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I agree with most of what you say.
If available,I prefer native applications since the integration with the OS and their performance,even on slow hardware,is amazing.
But ports being available is a great strength of Haiku.
There are many usecases for which native apps simply don’t exist yet,and rather than being completely unable to do whatever that is,you can do it with a ported app until a native replacement is written.
The goal is to have a native app for the most common tasks some day,and then nobody forces you to install the ported ones.
If you prefer,you can already use Haiku with only the native things today,none of the ported toolkits like GTK or Qt come preinstalled,and I don’t think the experience you’d get then is worse than SerenityOS.

SerenityOS actually does have ported applications and they are trying to port Wine. The only difference is that SerenityOS is a much younger project.

I’m calling it now, SerenityOS will just become better ReactOS.

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