Andreas Kling and the SerenityOS contributors, 2022. Independent.
SerenityOS is a free and open-source desktop operating system with a preemptive kernel. Swedish programmer Andreas Kling, who had worked at Nokia and on Apple’s WebKit team, began it in 2018 as a solo project, partly to help his recovery from addiction, and its name comes from the Serenity Prayer. It pairs the look of 1990s desktop software with a custom Unix-like core.
The project discourages third-party code, so the system has its own libraries and applications, including a web browser built on its own LibWeb, LibJS and LibWasm engines. It is written in a style its authors call Serenity C++. There is no release cycle and there are no binary releases: people build it from source. Kling’s YouTube videos of his development work helped make it one of the better-known hobbyist systems.
In 2024 Kling left to develop the Ladybird browser as a separate project, and the nonprofit Ladybird Browser Initiative was founded that July. SerenityOS is still developed by its community, at a slower pace. This exhibit resumes from a state saved on copy.sh, with a Terminal open, running a 1.0-dev build from a commit dated 10 November 2022.