Serpent OS, the new “truly modern” Distro
Ikey Doherty, best known as the creator of the Solus Linux project until his departure in 2018, today announced a new distro: Serpent OS (soon to be re-branded as Serpent Linux). On the Serpent OS website (https://www.serpentos.com/about/) Doherty explains that Serpent OS is intended to be “A Truly Modern Linux Distribution” with modern architectural design ideas like:
- 100% clang-built throughout (including kernel)
- Wayland-only. X11 compatibility via containers will be investigated
UEFIonly. No more legacy boot.- Moving away from
x86_64-genericbaseline to newer CPUs, including Intel and AMD specific optimisations
Doherty goes on to explain that Serpent OS will be “opinionated by default” by blocking drivers from companies that hold Linux back, such as NVIDIA. The press release mentions that other examples will follow, and it will be interesting to see which other big names may end up on the Serpent OS naughty list.
Serpent OS is going to be aimed at Linux enthusiasts and not at the general public looking to switch from macOS or Windows, but there are questions to be raised about the development decision making process since the team does not appear to be generally open to developing a community around the project, explaining that “We will only accept community involvement via our IRC channel”, and “In terms of feature requests, these will be largely at the discretion of core contributors.”. Of course, as an open source project developers can fork Serpent OS to contribute their own additions.
There are no estimates for a release date yet, but we will be keeping an eye on Serpent OS throughout the development process and keep you all updated. Development should start by the end of July. Learn more at serpentos.com.
