Ikey Doherty's Serpent OS Continues Building Up Its Rust Infrastructure

Ikey Doherty who is known for his work starting Solus Linus as well as the Budgie desktop while also formerly working on Intel's Clear Linux and other open-source software contributions has most recently been working on his newest endeavour: Serpent OS. A end-of-year development summary has now been posted that outlines the latest work on this Linux distribution.

Serpent OS has been driving forward with big improvements and a lot of investments made into its build infrastructure and tooling as opposed to being just a Ubuntu / Debian / Fedora re-spin as so many Linux distributions are these days. It was a year ago Serpent OS published its first ISO ahead of Christmas.

Serpent OS shows off their "moss" system package tool written in Rust.

This year the new build infrastructure launched, it was decided Solus Linux would forge a new direction with Serpent OS, wrote more code in D and Rust, and other improvements made for this growing Linux distribution.

In the EOY2023 Serpent OS summary written by Ikey Doherty and Rune Morling, it largely focuses on their continued Rust-based infrastructure. Serpent OS developers have been pleased with their Rust adoption, their Rust-based moss system package tool is now much better than its predecessor, and more. Their "TLDR" on the immediate future includes:

- Rust ports are coming along fantastically
- moss has been replaced
- still making use of existing tools and infrastructure to build the OS
- actually building the fully bootstrapped, self-contained OS, built on libc++, clang, glibc, etc.
- actively pushing updates to binary repository with fully automated pipeline
- new stuff is blazing fast

The Serpent OS plans for their live ISO are to produce a GNOME Shell based stack, the Firefox browser, GNOME Console as the likely terminal of choice, Flatpak package support, and more. Serpent OS isn't planning to create "a general purpose home-use distribution" but that's where Solus Linux and others can come into play.

Learn more about the latest Serpent OS work via SerpentOS.com.